We’re trying something different this month—liveblogging the presentation (photos to be added soon).

CTO Benjamin Rubin and engineer Paolo DePetrillo of Axon Labs are showing off their sleep technology at the September 13 Providence Geek Dinner.

• Axon Labs is a B to C company (brain to consumer)


• Formed company while Brown University undergrads

SleepSmart

• Intelligent alarm clock that monitors brain waves to wake you at the optimal time


• Headband+Base station (communicate wirelessly)

Hardware

• Sensors (comfy sensors)


• EEG


• ARM7 microcontroller


• Fast Fourier Transforms


• Neural Network


• Analog Electronics (A/D)


• Wireless (2.4Ghz, but not Wi-Fi—rolled their own)

Open Source tools used to build it:

• GSchem/PCB (schematic capture/layout)


• Python+scipy/numpy/matplotlib


• pyrex: python to c codeA


• FANN Fast Artificial Neural Network (trains and evaluates neural networks)

They showed off a prototype of the wireless headband. There was a black box (the wireless base station) connected to their laptop and the computer showed the brain waves. Updated: Axon Labs invites interested people to reserve one of the first 1,000 SleepSmart units.

At tonight’s Geek Dinner, local startup Axon Labs will be giving us a rare sneak peak at their next generation alarm clock technology. This is the first time Axon will be showing one of their functioning alpha headband units outside of the company.

Two Axon employees (and Providence Geeks), CTO Benjamin Rubin and engineer Paolo DePetrillo, will be presenting Axon’s cutting edge work building a consumer electronics product that uses EEG to wake a user feeling more refreshed. They will show sleep data collected using their lightweight, comfortable headband, and show real-time brain waves during a live demo of the system.

Get details and RSVP for tonight’s Geek Dinner

If you’re running OS X, check out Library Books. It logs into your library account(s) and gives you a status menu in your menubar. The date sort is waaaaay better than PPL’s web interface. It should work with the Athenaeum (and RISD?) too. It’s free, but the author does have a paypal tip jar.