Mind-Controlled Drone

A drone control system that reads brainwave activity from a MindWave EEG headset and translates it into flight commands through a physically modified remote controller.

Interfacing with the controller

Rather than replacing the radio link, I hacked the existing RC controller. That meant digitising the joystick potentiometers so an Arduino could drive them directly, replacing a human thumb with a voltage.

Because the Arduino produces PWM rather than a true analog voltage, I added low-pass filters to convert its output into the smooth analog levels the controller expects. Along the way I had to track down errors caused by resistor power dissipation, which shifted the voltages away from where the maths said they should be, the kind of fault that only appears once the circuit has been running for a while.

Signal interpretation

On the Arduino I wrote C++ to interpret the headset’s alpha, beta and gamma frequency bands and map them onto control output, producing a reliable enough signal to control levitation.