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opengswede
02-21-2006, 03:59 AM
Hi.

I'm one of those guys who plan and develop ideas, but never seem to complete, or even start them (at least if you ask my girlfriend). Anyway, i've been going back and forth on this forum and others, collecting ideas and I think i'm ready to present the one i've been working on.

Since i'm not really into taking an existing case and modding it, i'm more into building from scratch (and yes, it can be tricky, but bare with me here).
The idea is the following.

Think of a brain, in plexi, with sanded (or cut) sulci (the valleys). Now, spread out across the brain will be white LEDs which I aim to connect to an IC. The IC in turn is hooked up to the computer via the serial port. The LEDs are meant to flash in random pattern, but the frequency of the flashes is based on CPU usage. I think that this would look pretty neat, especially when CPU usage goes up, such as playing compressed media or compiling stuff.

Am i making any sense so far?

The brain will be hooked up to my mythtv box (running Gentoo linux) and getting a program to send CPU load to the serial port is the least of my worries.
Now to a few questions:
1. Is there anyone how know of a pre-manufactured board that can handle the signal from the serial port in the mannor described? A small IC which randomize activity over LEDs.
2. Do you think the project is feasible?
3. (this is my biggest dilemma right now) Should I paint the brain (at least on the gyri (ridges)? Or, should i put glossy plastic on it, to make it look more moist?

The third question could probably be dealt with way later... as I said before, I'm not really good at making my project come to life, time and whatnot is a big factor here. But if I do, i'll promise to show the progress here.

best

Nawl
02-21-2006, 05:00 AM
Välkommen !

Jetty_200
02-21-2006, 09:23 AM
....what:S?

pure_rock_fury
02-21-2006, 10:55 AM
One possible solution would be to go the hobby shop and find those medical models. They normally have a cut away of the brain there. You could either use the brain, or make it into a mold and cast it. As for the paint, I think it would be cool to make it as realistic as possible, I would deffinately paint it. Some high gloss clear would give it that gory wet look.

I don't want to encroach on your idea too much here, but what about making the brain look "bio-mechanical". Could take a screeeny of an old school circuit board and turn that into a temp to make some connections between the LED's

Here is a quick link to what I mean. http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/board5/pcb.html.

Are you intending to make this a complete case or just an add on that sits to the side? I recall a case that was made using mirrors where you couldn't see any of the inside components... quick search... grr can't find it right now. Basically the person used a mirror on an angle to hide the mobo and components. That is another thought to chew on. This sounds like a pretty cool idea, hopefully you will get a chance to try this one.

opengswede
02-21-2006, 11:57 AM
Thanks for the response.

First of, i'm not going to make it bio-mechanical, not that it's an interesting idea, it's more that i would never be allowed to put it in our livingroom :D

Second, I've thought about a mold or use an existing brain, but the ones i've seen are either too small or not see-through. and the whole point would be to have a the brain in clear plastic and then wet sand the parts that is going to be lit, ie the sulci. That way the light will spread across a sulcus.
I'll do a more thourogh googling to see if i can find a good model brain in a size that i need.

Painting will be done then. and perhaps add some veins running across the whole thing, either with LEDs in it or not... we just have to see.

For clarification, the brain will probably be sitting on top of a box (for now) containing my computer (a mini-itx, single HD). I might do something different with that too, but that will be a different story.

Aero
02-21-2006, 09:35 PM
what you could do is build a plexiglass box, fill it with a mixture of some sort to make it foggy and put the brain inside it, this would make it look like something from a move and the water would hide any small "mistakes" in the brain (in wouldn't need to be perfect).

For the fesibility of the project I don't see why it couldn't be done. It sounds like a cool idea to me. If you or someone can program the lights then it should be fine.

jdbnsn
02-22-2006, 12:19 AM
Do you work in the medical field by chance? I don't hear many refer to sulci and gyri on a daily basis, not that it's arcane knowledge or anything. Just a thought, not sure what size you want you brain, but a good shape for a mold could be the inside (or outside to make a cast) of a helmet. An old WWII from army surplus British style would work good, and you could model your sulci and gyri with modelling clay, to serve as a template for your plastic one later. And you don't need to worry about wire management, just paint them all red or blue and you have capillary beds...

opengswede
02-22-2006, 05:16 AM
Do you work in the medical field by chance? I don't hear many refer to sulci and gyri on a daily basis, not that it's arcane knowledge or anything. Just a thought, not sure what size you want you brain, but a good shape for a mold could be the inside (or outside to make a cast) of a helmet. An old WWII from army surplus British style would work good, and you could model your sulci and gyri with modelling clay, to serve as a template for your plastic one later. And you don't need to worry about wire management, just paint them all red or blue and you have capillary beds...

No, not in medical, but I am a cognitive scientist, and what we do is study the brain... I might even use my own as a model (if the pictures I have have high enough resolution).
About the mold using a helmet. good idea, i've been thinking of how to make the shape, and a helmet would fit nicely.
Anyone know of any plastic i could use that is easily shapable inside a mold, see-through, or at least let light through, and not that toxic that i end up frying my own brain (i've grown attached to it over the years).
THanks for the advice.
Erik

opengswede
02-22-2006, 05:21 AM
what you could do is build a plexiglass box, fill it with a mixture of some sort to make it foggy and put the brain inside it, this would make it look like something from a move and the water would hide any small "mistakes" in the brain (in wouldn't need to be perfect).

I like the idea, but what is "mixture of some sort" is that a technical term i'm missing in my lexical inventory?

I'll be considering this as an option, although my aim is to have the surface of the brain the outermost surface (ie i want to be able to touch it).
hmm, that sounds a bit kinky, but i'm aiming for gore here and touch is part of it I think.

For the programming bit, i'm into learning this myself so help is appreciated but the goal is to build it all myself (nothing is as satisfacory as doing it yourself, no?).

No, work is demanding attention...
Thanks
Erik

jdbnsn
02-22-2006, 12:52 PM
Are you going for a hard, plastic surface, or something more pliable? Cause if your going for realism (assuming fresh and not preserved) that's gonna be squishy! ewww

fobnicat
02-22-2006, 08:10 PM
No, not in medical, but I am a cognitive scientist, and what we do is study the brain... I might even use my own as a model (if the pictures I have have high enough resolution).


GASP! :eek: Use your own brain as a mold?!?!? HARDCORE!!! YEAH!.. oh wait.. you said resolultion... Picture.. Bah.. Still awesome though... Hell Yeah!

opengswede
02-23-2006, 05:13 AM
Are you going for a hard, plastic surface, or something more pliable? Cause if your going for realism (assuming fresh and not preserved) that's gonna be squishy! ewww

hmm, that gives me ideas... squishy would actually be great. need to find a material for that though.

Just came up with another idea, I could, as Aero pointed out, put it in a jar (but round) and put the brain in water, tinted by yellow dye. That way it would look like a brain in a jar of ether. i'd miss the touching part, but it might actually look better in the end, especially if i pull the wires out through a brain stem.
I' rummage through stores this upcomming weekend (girlfriend is working, having house to myself, :D ) and see what i can find. I might draw some pictures as well.

opengswede
02-23-2006, 05:15 AM
GASP! :eek: Use your own brain as a mold?!?!? HARDCORE!!! YEAH!.. oh wait.. you said resolultion... Picture.. Bah.. Still awesome though... Hell Yeah!

I wonder what abilities i might lose opening my skull to make a mold... ;)
that would probably go into the don't-try-this-at-home category.

Rankenphile
02-23-2006, 12:59 PM
I would suggest creating a mold for your project. For an excellent example of work of this nature, I would recommend reading through WilletFX's stunning animatronic monster mod (http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=979).

Create your master mold using a clay base, until you have the desired shape. Then follow the mold technique, but instead of using the silicone I would use a clear plastic that you could paint over, leaving thinner coats in the "cracks" of the brain to allow the light to get through. This would allow you to have a water-tight seal for you to suspend it in the yellowish "ether" in a jar. However, if you are planning on running a computer inside this thing, you will need some sort of cooling method, as running it in a completely enclosed space without any air circulation or other cooling will lead to a very fried system.

Do some more research on molding techniques, I'm sure you can find what you need. I hope you do, because this is a very intriguing project, and I'd love to see a worklog for it come about.

jdbnsn
02-23-2006, 02:30 PM
You know, if scquishy is what you want, I know what would give you a really realistic feel...AGAR. The same stuff used to make kirby bauer plate for basterial sampling. You can get the ingredients at mosts grociery stores and there are ways of mixing it to make it firmer but it would basically feel like jello. You should try making something 3 dimensional out of it and let it sit around for a couple of weeks to see how it holds up, you may need to build a skull to rest it in. But the best part is that it is clear, you could give it some light paint and push leds into it and regions would glow when lit. As long as the brain isn't touched too much it should hold up.

Rankenphile
02-23-2006, 02:51 PM
...except agar is extremely succeptible to fostering bacterial and fungal growth, which is precisely the reason they use it for bacterial sampling. Your brain would have a beard in a weeks time and become extremely toxic and dangerous over the period of a month or so.

Which, you know, is kind of cool. In a way. lol

If you want a squishy feel, you'd be MUCH better off using a silicone mold. It is paintable, durable and very bendy, and could be applied over the top of a plastic or metal inner shell or skeleton.

montmorency
02-23-2006, 04:28 PM
4 veins you could uses EL wire in red or blue.

jdbnsn
02-23-2006, 05:13 PM
...except agar is extremely succeptible to fostering bacterial and fungal growth, which is precisely the reason they use it for bacterial sampling. Your brain would have a beard in a weeks time and become extremely toxic and dangerous over the period of a month or so.

Which, you know, is kind of cool. In a way. lol

If you want a squishy feel, you'd be MUCH better off using a silicone mold. It is paintable, durable and very bendy, and could be applied over the top of a plastic or metal inner shell or skeleton.

Actually, it is very easy to mix additives to AGAR to make it growth resistant, this is often done to make whats called "selective media" (to select for a particular strain that can grow in such conditions). That being said, I kind of agree with you that silicon would make a better structure, it wouldn't feel quite like a real brain the way AGAR would, but I don't know how AGAR would hold up over long periods of time, it may start to break down. My opinion is go with silicon for a safe bet when it comes to stability, or if you want as realistic as possible, try the AGAR with some additives (high conc of NaCl and potassium should cover most bacteria, maybe lots of sugar too, I think that would exclude most pathogens if the concentrationis are high enough except maybe staph aureus, and fungi don't grow well on normal AGAR at all, only on Sarbaroud's so that's not a problem), then figure out a way to cover it with something to maintain it's shape. I would think it might be worth a try to use different types of shrink wrap that you shrink over the edges with a heat gun. The AGAR is heat resistent (hence the reason it replaced gelatin as preferred medium as well as it's inability to be digested by microorganisms), the tricky part would be getting the wrap to conform to deep ridges of the sulci. You may be able to push it into the sulci with a spatula or something as you heat around it, but it won't be all that easy. This in the end would make a model brain with stunning realism. Add some off-white coloring to the AGAR (about the shade of chicken fat) and spread some silicon grease or oil on the surface and you would have a slippery, squishy, translucent noggin that would make your anatomy professor queezy! You could get a bunch of low power leds and probe them in from the brainstem region to various lobules to make the regions glow from within. You know what would be way too cool? If you could figure out how to make certain leds turn on with specific activities. i.e. when playng video, light up the visual cortex area, when playing sound, light up Broca's speech center and other auditory regions, when processing general info, light up the medulla, accessing memory, light the temporal lobes, that would be sweet! Then you could use a more rigid material to model a skull cavity for it to rest in that has been opened with a bone-saw and mount the whole thing on the top of a case. If you want to get really crazy, buy a cheap, small webcam and remove the lens, make a model eye using similar techniques and mount it on the front of the case. I think this case mod idea of yours could be pretty damn cool!

montmorency
02-23-2006, 05:18 PM
those LEDs souns great, even tho i have no idea what any of those terms mean, it still sounds sweet!

fobnicat
02-23-2006, 07:40 PM
i see that being a dangerous mod to ones MOBO.. but hell the guy has already said hes gonna make a mold of his own brain..

opengswede
02-24-2006, 04:57 AM
Thanks guys for your input.

I can say that i'm currently looking into making a mold and using clear plastic. I have been studying WilletFx's awesome stuff... i'm thinking that my artistic level is not that high, but using pre-existings models and measure, measure, measure will probably help.
I am intrigued about using AGAR, the biggest problem, as pointed out, would be to get it to stick and stay put on top of the plastic. I guess I could wrap the whole thing in a thing clear plastic foil, but that would take away the stickiness, but perhaps keep the squishiness.

And believe me, I've been thinking about wireing leds to specific areas of the brain and have them fire of depending on the input. I'm currently looking at a circuit diagram that would let me do that, but I need to start small, ie get it all to fire randomly across the whole thing first, so i know a signal from the serial port actually does anything. then we can start talking about specific areas and such.
In addition, i've been thinking about connecting webcams and even building a whole head (brain exposed of course). Connecting a servo to make the head turn, and have software doing face tracking / motion tracking would be neat. But that will take some time to do (and currently time should be spent on my phD, not on building brains and wiring motion trackers across my home, which is a hell of lot more fun:D ).
If i go for the jar thing, i don't have to worry about surface of the brain, which will help. But i need to think about this more closely, cooling will be a definite probelm (unless the water surrounding the brain is exchanged for, say cooking oil, but i guess that needs cooling too...).
If this project takes off, i'll be posting a worklog, definitly.

And fobnicat, why is this a dangerous mod to my mobo? i can (if needed) keep the competer completely separate from brain (or not, depending on the solution i end up using).

fobnicat
02-24-2006, 12:48 PM
Sorry I wasnt thinkinga bout using the serial port.. I was thinking you would ahve to hit the actual mobo to get the LED's to fire when certain processes were being done.. Haha just forget I posted

Slug Toy
02-25-2006, 04:38 AM
ok, i've been following the events around here for who knows how long... maybe 6 months or more, and i finally decided to start putting my two cents in around here.

so here are my two cents. i got an idea spurred on by the mythbusters. how about ballistics gel? just add some chalk or flour into it and some red food colouring and it should work nicely. squishy, kinda rubbery, and a translucent pink. then you could embed LED's about a centimeter under the surface and have the wiring trace back to where the spinal cord would be. and if anything goes wrong while making it, just take it to the firing range and uh... simulate a headshot.

i cant say anything about getting any ballistics gel though. i dont know where to get it, and i dont know how expensive it is, but if you're creative and resourceful enough you'll get your hands on it. people these days can get their hands on anything.

you may want to spray a sealant in on if you do end up using ballistics gel. from what i remember its made of animal by-products so there may be a tendency to attract unwanted pests and to rot. ive never heard of anything lasting long enough to have any of those problems though.

anyways, im gonna cut myself off now cause i do like to talk. ill just close off by saying that ballistics gel may be equally as handy as agar, and perhaps less prone to bacterial growth. give it some thought at least.

opengswede
02-25-2006, 10:59 AM
Hmm, ballistics gel hey? Could work, but, if i remeber my mythbusters correct it's expensive as hell... AGAR is cheap (or could be), but then again, gelatin might work just as well.
Currently i'm looking into putting the brain in a jar anyways, so the whole sticky + squishy will have to wait. I'm thinking that using a jar will get me closer to reality quicker.

My brainstorm right now is how to build a circuit board that can handle 1 or 2 signals from the serial port to drive XX LEDs. being the comp geek i am, i tend to over-generalize solutions (ie this ciruit should work doing other solutions too, or at least the design should be easy to alter (you know, swapping one chip to go from complete randomness to specific cortical activation (or as i'm currently thinkning, just use the serial port to do that switch, so i can make the switch on'line))) (i think that is the right amount of parentheses) (:p) (this starts to look fearsomely (is that a word (and is it spellt that way)) close to LISP).

jdbnsn
02-25-2006, 04:03 PM
I don't know anything about ballistics gel, but it raises a good point. There are lots of gel-based products that we haven't discussed and I'll bet if you research a short while you can find one that fits your design perfectly. I wouldn't use gelatin though, it will break down. AGAR replaced gelatin for just this reason, AGAR is agarose or cellulose produced from seaweed and is itself indigestable by bacteria (within a few days, your gelatin will be liquified). Infact, bacterial media are made by adding nutrients to the AGAR so they will grow on it, so pure AGAR may itself be growth free (don't quote me on this, but fairly sure). But there are so many different products out there, I'm sure there is something that fits this design well so you can have the best of all worlds.

jdbnsn
02-25-2006, 04:22 PM
Just thought of another possibility, what about using that clear glue from a hot-glue gun. You know, it comes in sticks and is faily cheap, the gun heats it as you push it through the cylinder and it comes out the other end a liquid. But it hardens quickly and remains clear, but it stays relatively soft (kinda quishy). Just a thought...

opengswede
02-26-2006, 09:49 AM
Not a bad idea, about the hot glue... that can also be remolded with some heat and a tool (something that fits the project and is expendible).

about the gelatin, yeah i thought there was some problems with that. on the other hand, it might be cool to have the brain slowly turn into liquid. with the slight drawback that i have to keep redoing it every so often.

jdbnsn
02-26-2006, 03:56 PM
Not a bad idea, about the hot glue... that can also be remolded with some heat and a tool (something that fits the project and is expendible).

about the gelatin, yeah i thought there was some problems with that. on the other hand, it might be cool to have the brain slowly turn into liquid. with the slight drawback that i have to keep redoing it every so often.


Ha Ha! I like it! Chronic, repetative, spongioform encephaltitis! Mad Cow style!

opengswede
02-28-2006, 03:34 AM
Ha Ha! I like it! Chronic, repetative, spongioform encephaltitis! Mad Cow style!
Hmm, i wonder if it'd be posible to measure resistance (conductivity) across the gel, and then introduce computing errors based on the degradation of hte brain.

anyway, dug up a few links over the weekend which seem to be good, now i just need to move to US so I can get hold of the stuff.

brain mold, this was the cheapest i could find there are others available:
http://www.tcnj.edu/~lockhar2/jello.htm

plastics:
http://www.ares-server.com/Ares/Ares.asp?MerchantID=RET01229&Action=Catalog&Type=Department&ID=63

has anyone got any experiences with micromark, are they good, reliable etc?

-.erik

Rankenphile
02-28-2006, 12:35 PM
Micromark has always been, in my experience, very reliable and of very high quality. I've purchased modelling tools from them for years, and my father referred me to them, as he had been buying from them for a very long time. You can get everything from them, from jeweler's files to HO-scale paint.

opengswede
03-01-2006, 04:04 AM
Micromark has always been, in my experience, very reliable and of very high quality. I've purchased modelling tools from them for years, and my father referred me to them, as he had been buying from them for a very long time. You can get everything from them, from jeweler's files to HO-scale paint.

thanks. i'll probably be sending off an order soon, the $US has gone down a bit and that makes shipping cheaper than within the EU.

Another question:
is there an alternative to plexi, i just got a quote from our local dealer (for a 20x20cm block) and that was ~1200$ / m... a bit hefty for me?