Microstimulation Experiment: Yes, you can excite the leg with your phone
Another common request we get from users is “Can you stimulate the leg as well?” to which we have always replied, “Yes, there are some stimulation circuits we can build, we have that idea in the queue.” Which means, of course, that the idea is relegated to the backlog of the many cool things we can work on given our limited resources, which by extension means the prototype development will be awhile.
But happily, we realized were overthinking it! It turns out the output of headphone jack on a computer/iPhone is1.3 V, with a maximum output of 750 A. Tim seems to recall (shameless self-promotion) from his graduate work that those voltage/current levels are well above the requirements to excite muscle and nervous system tissue. Fellow colleagues, we now present, to our growing video lab, how to do your own microstimulation experiment!