puzzlebox

Thanks for the interest!Yes, it should certainly be possible to control the helicopter by attaching potentiometers to an Arduino. That's effectively what the original remote control is doing anyway. You'd just want to read position values from one or more potentiometers and then convert the scale to match the one(s) expected by the helicopter. So for example if your throttle pot returns positions from 0-100 but the helicopter is expecting values from 0-255 you'd have to do the conversion in software before passing it on.You might have other considerations depending on the hardware, such as if the helicopter is expecting a constant stream of position data (repeating the same frames again and again) or if you only need to send changes as they are made.

We always appreciate the support! You can cause the Orbit (or a hacked helicopter as per above) to take flight while you are focused or mentally relaxed and so on, but there's not enough information in most consumer-grade EEG headsets to be able to actually steer as well. For now you have to tilt your mobile phone or table and steer that way. However we're currently working on a guide that allows you to use an OpenBCI EEG and build your own headset to perform "motor imagery" for steering by using imaginary hand and feet gestures: https://puzzlebox.io/telekinesis/

Yes that's correct. You're sending packets with the complete settings for all motors and their power levels at a constant rate (determined by the helicopter's RC controller protocol), which is sort of a "keep alive" for the helicopter when sent with the "no_thrust" configuration. If you didn't send any packets at all the helicopter might "time out" after a certain period.

Yes, the MindFlex uses the same TGAM chip from NeuroSky as is in the headset we used (currently the MindWave Mobile). You'll need to perform a hardware hack to get the data stream out, but Puzzlebox Synapse will parse it on any platform.https://github.com/PuzzleboxIO/synapse-python