Snow Crash: Electronic Hallucinogen

It's a simple headband that makes you see crazy flashing, mutating light patterns! It also seems to make you feel energetic or calm depending on the frequency. Passing High-Voltage, Low-Current electricity through your forehead to give yourself a private light-show has never been easier. It's cheap, and not that hard to make. In fact, if you have one of our Mod personal massagers or a dilduino board, you hook this setup directly to it and let yourself be internally massaged with vibrations that sync up to crazy light patterns in your eyes! Let us show you how to do this! If you follow our steps, you will have an awesome device for seeing crazy visuals and potentially changing your mood, as well as a DIY Tens-unit for stimulating your nerves!

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This project is brought to you by Comingle.io, the Open-Source Sex Toy company. We are launching a brand new crowdfunding campaign at http://igg.me/at/mod to fund the mass production of a new fully hackable personal massager. It lets you connect any kind of sensor or controller for fun new experiences. Check it out to learn all about this exciting new sex toy platform!
In our campaign, you can also ORDER A SNOW CRASH KIT RIGHT NOW!

Q: WHAT?????????? You are zapping your brain and seeing crazy lights? Yep! What's going on?!

A: Phosphenes and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

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Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation) is something people have actually been doing for quite some time. It was originally created to help people with brain injuries, but people have begun using it on healthy adults for therapeutic reasons. There are all sorts of claims surrounding TDCS, (many supported and many that are less supported) like that it can "enhance language and mathematical ability, attention span, problem solving, memory, and coordination." I've heard about hard-core gamers and the military using it for concentration reasons. This company, Thync, even just raised 13 million dollars with this idea!

At Comingle, we don't care as much about these Utopian claims of perfecting your mind, and instead we just think it can be something super fun to experience!

According to many places it's actually quite safe (if you keep the current limited, which we do!) and has almost no noted side-effects (other than seeing crazy lights sometimes!). Which brings us to...

Phosphenes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene) are little flashes of light that occur when your retina gets stimulated. They can occur from magnetic, electronic, or even physical stimulation. In our setup they seem to occur most intensely when the electricity passing around your head changes abruptly. People doing TDCS notice these right when they start or stop the electricity. By turning on and off the current quickly we can get all kinds of crazy flashing patterns and visuals.

Origins

This entire setup was all originally created by researcher Matthew Swarts. He originally came up with this design to experiment with electro-tactile stimulation at the Georgia Tech-NUS Sensory Augmentation Workshop in Singapore. I just put his design on my head instead of my muscles, and started seeing crazy sparkles. This was pretty cool, so i have been researching it more over the past year.

Nick Moryl was the one who first had the brilliance to call this crazy electronic device that makes you see flashing lights "Snow Crash."

Key Components

DC-DC Booster ($8) (This is a cheaper version $4, but without included voltmeter display)

This is the key component to this entire setup. It's an awesome device that you can feed a small voltage (like 3 volts), and it can amplify it up to 30 or even 60 volts! They are cheap too! I would say spend the extra bucks on one with a built-in voltmeter.

Opto-Isolator ($1)

These are the other crucial component of the setup. They keep the high-voltage and low-voltage sides electrically isolated from each other so if something shorts out, your electronics won't break! They are a simple switch that flips whenever the low voltage side turns high. The high and low voltage sides communicate with a super fast LED inside the chip.

Microcontroller ($20-40) (We used the Dilduino that's inside our mods, which is nice for embedding in self-contained projects)

Really you can do this with any kind of microcontroller. Things as small as Attiny85's to full arduino megas can all be used. Something nice though are boards like the Lilypad USB that are pretty self-contained, and have built-in charging circuits.

Electronics

• Solder
• Wire
• Breadboard
• Protoboard
• LED (SMD like lilytwinkles are nice!)
• Switch
• Header pins
• Lipo Battery

Stimulation Gear

• Electrode TENS pads ($2)
• Conductive Adhesive Gel ($6) (Optionally you can also just use regular water-based Lube, like KY)

Headband Gear

• Fabric (We actually used hypercolor fabric because it's EXTRA CYBERPUNK)
• Hot Glue (You could sew it if you wanted to be fancier than me!)
• Water-dissapearing ink Fabric Pen Super handy for laying out electronics on fabric!

Safety

WARNING : WE ARE NOT DOCTORS. WE KNOW VERY LITTLE ABOUT THE BRAIN. WE ZAPPED OUR OWN BRAINS AND WERE ALRIGHT, BUT WHO KNOWS IF THERE ARE HIDDEN SIDE EFFECTS TO THIS.

Basically just DON'T DO THIS.

We are just presenting this information for people curious as to how this technology can work.A key to staying safe is to always LIMIT THE CURRENT PASSING THROUGH YOUR BODY. Current can KILL YOU.

Have fun!

Do not operate machinery like Deliverators, Skull Cannons, Matter Compilers, Magnapoons, or Pedomotives while Snow-Crashing.

Safety

WARNING : WE ARE NOT DOCTORS. WE KNOW VERY LITTLE ABOUT THE BRAIN. WE ZAPPED OUR OWN BRAINS AND WERE ALRIGHT, BUT WHO KNOWS IF THERE ARE HIDDEN SIDE EFFECTS TO THIS.

Basically just DON'T DO THIS. 
We are just presenting this information for people curious as to how this technology can work.

A key to staying safe is to always LIMIT THE CURRENT PASSING THROUGH YOUR BODY. Current can KILL YOU.

Have fun!.

Do not operate machinery like Deliverators, Skull Cannons, Matter Compilers, Magnapoons, or Pedomotives while Snow-Crashing.

Before you dedicate to building the whole headband, make sure you know how to set up the circuit exactly right. It's pretty straightforward for an electronics assembly. Feed the booster 3 volts and GND on the IN+ side. Connect one of your inputs on the Dilduino to the opto-isolator's main input (near the dot). Put a 330 ohm resistor on the bottom lead of the low-voltage side of the opto-isolator, connecting it to ground.One electrode will hook to the OUT+ side of the voltage booster, and the other will connect to the Opto-isolator. For the other input on the dilduino's hackerport, you can connect any kind of controller to make your hallucinations pulse with a Knob, Microphone, Pressure sensor, or light sensor.

Make sure to add a 330ohm resistor between the opto-isolator and the ground!

At this point, you have made a basic TENS unit (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation). Try sticking the electrodes on your body in different places. Play with different pulsing patterns!

TENS units come with a general warning to NOT PLACE THEM ON YOUR NECK. It could make your neck muscles cramp up and potentially choke you!

Always start with the voltage booster turned ALL THE WAY DOWN (to 3V). Then slowly increase the electrical output by rotating the potentiometer on the DC booster to see how the sensations change and feed. Don't do anything that's uncomfortable for you! Always stimulate with another person in the room! Voltages around 6-25V are pretty normal for getting cool sensations and basic muscle twitching.

Use the same protocol as with your muscles. FIRST TURN THE VOLTAGE ALL THE WAY DOWN. Then SLOWLY increase it. You will have much lower tolerance for voltages on your head than thicker parts of your body. The sweet spot we have found is around 9V.

It's annoying to have all these components dangling around in a breadboard! Let's connect it all in a more durable form!

The White LED is connected to where your brain will eventually go![/caption]

Get a protoboard, solder together your circuit permanently. Use Female Header pins for the 3 connections to your Dilduino and for the output to your electrodes.

Cut a piece of fabric with plenty of length to be a headband but 3 times as wide as you want it to be. It will be folded over the electronics.

Hot glue attaches to cloth super well. Get everything secure, and if there are electrical components that might pull apart or short circuit, add reinforcement with hot glue.

Just press the codebender button and upload it to your Dilduino!

Up to date code can always be found on our github: https://github.com/Comingle/Comingle_Example_Sketches/tree/master/Mod/E-Stim

Strap on your headband and test it out! Rotate your knob, or whatever sensor you have connected and "tune" into different crazy patterns and feelings! Test out adding other kinds of sensors. It's fun to have it controlled by music or your heartbeat.

Maintaining your Crash Pads

You should be able to reuse your pads over and over again. Adding a bit of Conductive Adhesive helps out a lot! If they get gunky, take a wet microfiber cloth and gently try to wipe the forehead oil off.

If they get really old, just replace them!

Instead of having to use official pads, I tried adding conductive fabric instead. It totally worked but I originally did this in a really sloppy manner, and left the gator clip near my forehead and it singed me a tiny bit. I think this was because the TENS pads have a lot of built-in current-limiting capabilities. You can probably make a much sleeker headband with conductive fabric, but just plan it out better and add resistors and stuff!

Tips:

Lube works great to make your pads conductive!

Conductive Fabric could potentially replace the electrodes, but use with caution!

I accidentally burned my head a tiny bit because I did not use a real TENS-Pad and did not have enough resistance.