Baby Steps

The Arduino arrived. I have no electrodes though. But what are electrodes, just some pieces of metal taped to your skin, right? Let's improvise that:

There are two pieces of aluminum foil taped to my skin, held together with blue medical wrap.

The educational material about electromyographs that I've seen described a chain of hardware elements to process and clean up the signal:

• amplification
• filtering
• rectification
• antialiasing
• smoothing
• averaging
• etc.

But I thought, let's focus on the MVP. Why not simply hook the electrodes straight to the analog input pins of the Arduino with some alligator clamps? Worked fine. I did minimal signal processing in software though, you can find the source code here.

This video shows the myoelectric signal on Arduino IDE's built-in signal plotter:

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• Newer post: F-Zero
• Older post: The Idea
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• Date: 2021-04-08
• Author: Roman