Hasta La Gadget!

Let’s face it: Taking it easy isn’t very easy. Meditation classes, binge drinking, marijuana, movies with sexy blue alien cats — these are the things we hardworking Americans rely on to help us unwind. But what if we could eliminate stress altogether? What if we could train our brains to stay relaxed forever?

That’s the idea behind Harcos Laboratories “most painful toy hack ever.” The team of kooky geeks was intrigued with Mattel’s Mindflex, a wireless headset that reads the frequency of your brainwaves to levitate a ball. LEDs on the headset light up if you’re concentrating hard; if you’re calm, no LEDs light up. Harcos Lab wondered, “How can we put that to more practical use in our everyday lives?”

Easy: Reprogram the Mindflex to shock the bejeezus out of you if you concentrate too hard. Harcos hooked up the leads of the LEDs to a transistor/resistor relay network so they’d instead activate an electric-shock kit made by QKit. The end result? Concentrate a little, and you’ll get zapped a little. Concentrate hard, and you’ll get an electrical pulse that will make you think you’ve wandered onto the set of Green Mile. What a shockingly brilliant solution to all our problems!

Actually, the hack wasn’t that easy. Harcos admits it was difficult opening up the Mindflex. A full how-to is over on Harcos’ blog. Check out the lab’s Mindflex hack in the video below.

(Thanks, Jon!)

See Also:

• Toy Hacking Workshop
• Hardware Hacker Charged With Selling Cable Modems That Get Free …
• DIY Freaks Flock to ‘Hacker Spaces’ Worldwide
• Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank
• Hardware Hackers Create a Modular Motherboard