You probably know that the Pyramid was designed to be a stand-alone remote control for the Orbit helicopter. What you may not know is that the Pyramid is also highly hacker-friendly, featuring custom Arduino-compatible circuit boards, Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity and infrared recording and playback.

In plain English, this means Puzzlebox open-sources its CAD files, its hardware designs, and its software, so makers and hackers can modify it to control a wide range of infrared devices with their brainwaves.

After we ship the Pyramid to early buyers, we will write up  a detailed guide to these hacks.

(Thanks to our friends at Atmel for hosting us!)

From June 3-7, many of the leading researchers in the brain-computer interface community gathered in Monterey, CA, to share their research, insights and debates with each other.

While we were there, we broke bread with a bunch of awesome people.

One of those people was Alex Doud, whose team at the University of Minnesota just announced its mind-controlled Parrot AR quadricopter. Naturally, we had a lot to talk about, so we took the opportunity to interview him about his work.

Read the interview with Alex on the Puzzlebox blog >>

Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz went to Maker Faire and had some nice things to say about the Orbit.

Meanwhile, in the latest edition of Wired UK, writer Madhumita Venkataramanan profiled Steve and the Orbit Helicopter. “Mind-controlled toys,” she writes, “are really taking off.”

We see what she did there.