Over the holiday season, hundreds of people opened their gifts to find toy helicopters—that they could fly with their minds. But beyond being an entertaining toy, Puzzlebox founder Steve Castelloni says he hopes the Puzzlebox Orbit, a mind-controlled toy helicopter, will be the springboard to new scientific developments.
The Puzzlebox Orbit, a small infrared-directed helicopter within a sphere, is Puzzlebox’s first piece of hardware. Castelloni ran a Kickstarter to fund the mass production of these helicopters, which ended early last month and raised over seven times its $10,000 goal.
The San Francisco-based company has until now paired their open-source software, Puzzlebox Brainstorms, with existing toy vehicles.
Puzzlebox has been working with schools for the past two years, teaching middle-school students neuroscience with electroencephalography (EEG) headsets like NeuroSky MindWave coupled with Lego Mindstorms kits. The billions of neurons inside a human brain create the tiniest electrical charge, which is measurable by EEG, and these headsets place sensors on specific parts of the head to respond to these “brainwaves.”
Puzzlebox’s brain-computer interface (BCI) software, Puzzlebox Brainstorms, has been open source from the beginning, which anyone is encouraged to test, modify, and experiment with. BCI is a system that responds to signals from the brain, as measured by the headsets, to control a device. Likewise, Puzzlebox Orbit is open hardware and software.
Castelloni said the success of the Kickstarter was unexpected. “We were just trying to gauge their initial interest,” he said. The project raised double its goal in the first ten days, and Puzzlebox released the first educational guide to hacking your own remote-controlled helicopter (turning it into a brain-controlled helicopter) early, as a celebration.
