The SEMG product concept started out in 2009 when I was running down a 3 mile route nearby my parent's home, and the road in particular is dark at night. There are few street lamps, and cars go down at a limit of 40mph, but let's be honest, most people don't give two $#!ts about speed limits. There's no sidewalk, and barely any shoulder. As I ran, I wondered if I could use the SEMG signal from my legs to control a light pattern to warn oncoming cars with a non patterned light show, like how some animals have vivid colors to ward off potential predators with a show of flair - that also meant they were poisonous.

So, I went back to my ancient senior design thesis, which made use of SEMG signals to control robotics, and saw that the Arduino was coming along. And that's when it hit me. Combine the two. Here's the first quick and dirty prototype when I started testing the feasibility of the concept.

I'm a really fast prototyper. I like quick and dirty proof of concepts just to see if an idea is feasible, so naturally I grabbed one of my arduinos, and searched around for cheap electrodes. Advancer Technologies, http://www.advancertechnologies.com/

design came up, so scratch built one first, built a few using this Instructable, also from Advancer

Instructables SEMG sensor

, and after a few rounds with a klunky bread board, I then I bought some of their integrated circuit boards. I wanted to see if I could make a level meter of my muscles, using LED's. For that, here's the setup hooked up with some LED's.

I then tested it out with some weights, to see how sensitive it was. So I curled a 25 pound weight to check it out.

The idea proved sound. It was onto the next step, to make it wearable.