Creative Madhouse®

Advertising Agency: Yarkoni, Haifa, Israel
Creative Director: Gil Goren
Art Director: Nir Cshnapp
Copywriter: Gil Goren
Photographer: Ariel Van Straten
Art team member: Avishai Dotan

We wanted to hack a device, so that unless you remained calm and your brain stayed idle, it would shock the hell out of you. Would the horrible fear of impending pain cause you to clear your mind, or concentrate and receive said pain? Would extended use of the device ruin your neural net so that you could no longer concentrate for fear of being shocked?
As soon as we saw the Mindflex toy pop up on Gizmodo, I ordered one. I've wanted an electroencephalogram (EEG) since I saw one on Scientific Amercian Frontiers when I was 9. Oh yes, the power to read minds, or at least brainwave activity.
The Mindflex utilizes a wireless headset to detect the frequency of your brain activity. If you are calm and idle, no LEDs will light up. If you are concentrating strongly, all of the LEDs will light up (and a little motor will levitate a ball). I happened to know that Eli, the other founder here at Harcos Labs, absolutely hated being shocked. This project was going to be DELIGHTFUL.

I decided that I would output the top two LED's leads to a transistor/resistor/relay network that would activate an electroshock unit I ordered off QKits. The first LED would power on the electroshock unit and give a painless tingle through a resistor network. The second LED would activate a transistor that would activate a relay that would bypass the resistor network and give the user the full brunt of the electric shock. Initially, I was going to use a separate shocking unit for 3 of the LEDs, but when I put together the unit from QKits, I found that only one was too painful to hold on to for more than few.

You may find the circuit below useful for activating electroshock circuits via digital data. I'd never set up a transistor to use one power source to activate a second power source.
Things I used for this hack:

2 x 2N2222 NPN transistors

1k to 500k resistors

2 x 9 volt batteries

a few brave souls from SMBC Theater

a now-angry co-founder

a QKits electric shock kit

1 zener diode (to prevent flyback from the relay coil from frying the transistor)

1 LED
Opening the Mindflex unit was difficult. You have to drill out the glued plastic plugs in the bottom and then take out the screws. I still couldn't get it open so I used a Dremel to cut through the side and access the LEDs.

http://www.harcoslabs.com/mostpainful.html