How to Get Reeled into NeuroDuino – a Mathematician’s Guide (Part II)
— Written by Natalia Díaz —
Hi there, it’s Natalia Díaz again with an update to my neuromathematical (yes, such a thing exists!) project. If you don’t remember me, I’m a student of Mathematical Engineering at the University of Santiago de Chile and I’m doing my internship here in BackyardBrains.
Since the last time we met (you and I, that is), BYB co-founder Tim Marzullo sent me some cool stuff. Not that it’s an exclusive privilege of interns, mind you! Anyone can find them in the “Muscle SpikerShield Bundle” kit.
With this bundle, you can do several very entertaining experiments such as seeing on your smartphone the action potentials that are produced when you move your muscles. You can also use the Muscle SpikerShield to control video games, robotics, and musical instruments.
It took a while for my board to pass customs, but it managed to arrive and we got to work right away. What I was most excited about was the arrival of new prototype from Backyard Brains – their very own customized Arduino board – codenamed NeuroDuino. (See above how handsome it is!)
Ben Antonellis, a guy who works for Backyard Brains, had created certain functions for a new interface called “NeuroBoard” that will make it easier for users to write working code for the Muscle SpikerShield / NeuroDuino. But the functions needed to be tested and verified by someone other than the principal developer. So, Tim asked me to do the testing and document the process.
Then came testing, testing, testing…
So what we did at the beginning was try to understand the code that Ben created, where he explained to us a bit what each function should do. For this, we use the Arduino and C ++ programs. For example, we have commands to:
- Start measurements
- Find the greatest value of the channel measurements
- Define the channel that we are going to use (if we select a different one from the one used, there will be no measurements)
- Function to determine which button is pressed
- Etc. (Still letting our imagination run wild!)
At first, we had a little trouble at understanding the commands and nomenclature, but we managed to test several of the pre-made functions. However, some did not work for us, so we asked Ben to help us figure out what we were doing wrong.
Ben helped us right away, tweaked the code a bit, and finally the three of us were able to test all the functions. Most of them worked well and some have yet to be modified. But we made a breakthrough, and now most of the code is tested and verified save for a relay function that’s still patiently waiting for its 15 minutes (or hours) of fame.
We are almost done with this phase of my internship, and for the rest of February, my final month, I will be looking into some custom Python analysis scripts.
Tim and I have been working remotely for the past two months, but we finally had a chance to work face-to-face this week (with social distancing and masks of course). The picture above shows how it went.
Stay tuned for my final blog post update at the end of February!