I busted out the shapelock and made the first of a number of prototypes for the socket that will be my magnet implant computer interface. the general design I’m planning for is a full finger socket, most likely to the metacarpophalangeal joint. It will have a small amount wiggle room for the tip of my finger bu otherwise be a snug fit. The inductor coil will be embedded in a groove in the plastic, and the magnetometer will fit in a dent in the bottom. I’m considering a fabric sleeve to hide the wires and keep things from getting snagged.

I attempted magnet insertion myself and went at it with a friend all scrubbed up to assist. Unfortunately, my scalpel wasn’t shaped correctly (#10) to make a deep enough pocket without making a massively oversized incision, and the lidocaine was wearing off by the time I tried using the tip of my surgical scissors to open a pocket, which created a triangular shaped opening that didn’t fit the magnet well anyway. I had it big enough for the magnet to fit but it barely peeked through the wound, and there was no way to stitch it so I called it off.

These two are the guts of my interface plans:

Arduino Leonardo

The Arduino Leonardo is an awesome board. It’s quite similar to the Arduino Uno, which I’m quite experienced with, but the biggest difference (and reason I’m getting it) is that it can emulate HID’s in Windows, meaning it can trigger mouse movement/click events, as well as keyboard input. I plan to either directly map it to a mouse, or have different measurements trigger innocuous keystrokes that can be picked up in the background by something like vJoy and mapped to joystick inputs.

Prepping for magnet implant surgery tonight!!

Today I took my first stab at coding some general magnetic detection code that will work with a magnetometer to detect finger presence, finder flexion, and finger extension, all based on magnet proximity to make a magnet HID. I haven’t even received my magnetometer or Leonardo yet (the Uno doesn’t support HID emulation), so I’m sure this code won’t work in practice, but it compiles and I’ll use it as a v. 0.01 for future enhancements. My only two concerns are finding a sweet spot for the finger to rest (perhaps foam above the magnetometer?), and saturation of the Hall effect chip the magnetometer runs on, but I’ll jump off that cliff when I come to it.

Well Trucrypt just went nuts. This could be bad.

I love you, version control.

I love all the time we spend together – merge conflicts, rebasing repos, accidentally committing vendor folders on my Composer projects…

You really have saved my butt so many times – it truly appreciate you.

But right now just isn’t working for us. I’m off at college! I mean the last time I saw you was during my gap year – and we did see each other every day. But now distance has quelled the fire. I’m working on smaller personal projects to stay sharp, and I’m just looking for something casual. I don’t want to commit on every change! It’s not like I break the codebase that often, anyway…

It’s been a long time since I’ve set up a website I can call entirely my own. I’ve done countless jobs for clients, but since my corporate site (which I haven’t touched in over two years), I haven’t had anything publically facing that had solely my identity on it. I always dread template selection and visual design of blogs for my clients, but now that I have a chance to do it, it’s at once fun and frustrating to get things just the way I like them – perhaps I should stop judging!