Shocking Counter-Strike 2 Experiment: Neuromuscular Aim Assist in Action

A YouTuber has taken Counter-Strike 2 aim training to a new level — by wiring his body to a Raspberry Pi that shocks his arm into position when an enemy appears on screen. Basically Homeless calls it a “neuromuscular aim assist,” claiming it’s not cheating since it’s his muscles moving, not the game’s code doing the aiming. The results were faster reaction times, some improvement in shooting accuracy, and a lot of pained yells.

The device works through a mix of off-the-shelf hardware and game-detection code. First, an app scans the game for enemies using a YOLO object detection algorithm, the same type found in certain Counter-Strike cheat tools. Once an enemy is detected, it sends the direction to a Raspberry Pi. That Pi activates electrodes attached to the YouTuber’s arm and wrist, forcing his muscles to contract and swing the crosshair toward the target.

His motivation was straightforward: younger players often have reaction times under 150 milliseconds, while his average was 201 ms. The neuromuscular assist was meant to close that gap. Initial testing showed the concept could cut his reaction time to 95 ms — well below even the fastest human players. But in a full 30-target aim training run, he only managed to hit seven, showing that reaction speed wasn’t the only factor in success.

Building the setup was far from easy. Finding the right muscles to shock required a lot of trial and error, and he quickly discovered the process was uncomfortable.

“Personally, I find it unpleasant,” he admitted.

To solve that, he recruited a more willing participant to help locate the precise muscle groups for left and right wrist movement. Electrodes were then positioned at nerve entry points and along the muscle itself for consistent contractions.

Once the targeting worked, he added emergency shut-off switches to avoid accidents. But another hurdle appeared — the Raspberry Pi’s lag. The Pi sometimes took too long to process signals, reducing responsiveness. The solution was a hardware upgrade: a Pi 5 paired with a powerhouse gaming PC — an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU, a large chunk of RAM, and an ultrawide monitor.

Before taking it into matchmaking, he also needed to prevent friendly fire. This meant teaching the detection software to tell allies from enemies. His final choice was to adapt more cheat code logic so the electrodes only fired when an enemy was on screen.

The most ambitious addition was a “neuromuscular trigger bot.” By finding and wiring the muscle that controls his trigger finger, the system could automatically fire when his crosshair passed over an enemy’s head. Combined with the aim assist, this meant the entire shooting process could happen almost instantly without conscious decision-making.

The matchmaking tests were a mix of frustration and success. While the shocks remained uncomfortable, he began to adapt, and the setup occasionally produced lightning-fast responses — especially against enemies peeking from unexpected angles. Scoped weapons proved particularly effective with the system, as the aim assist made small, precise adjustments that felt natural.

“It truly made it feel like I was just better than I actually was … It worked good,” he said.

Still, he maintained his stance throughout the experiment:

“It’s not cheats, you know what I’m saying? It’s my muscles doing it.”

The device didn’t guarantee victory, and there were moments he couldn’t tell if it was helping or not. But there were also times it genuinely felt like the computer was in control of his arm. That odd sensation — and the sharp, sudden shocks — made the experience unlike any traditional input method.

This neuromuscular aim assist sits in a strange space between experimental hardware mod and cheat tool. It doesn’t alter the game’s code or use external devices to manipulate the mouse directly; instead, it manipulates the player’s body. That raises questions about where competitive integrity begins and ends when technology starts closing the gap between human and machine.

For Basically Homeless, the project was as much about pushing boundaries as it was about improving his gameplay. Whether the gaming world accepts his “it’s not cheating” defense or not, the sight of a Counter-Strike player being electrocuted into faster shots is something the esports scene won’t forget soon.

It’s unclear if this approach could be adapted into something both safe and tournament-legal, but the technical creativity — and the self-inflicted discomfort — make it one of the more unusual gaming hardware experiments in recent memory. For now, it remains a high-voltage example of just how far some players will go to shave a few milliseconds off their reaction time.