Here is a project that I am very impressed with. It is done by my good friend Brandon over at zerosign.net. He took a power glove, you know the cool looking, poorly functioning glove from the 80s for the NES, and turned it into a mouse. What he did was take the cover off the back of the hand to expose the circuit board. He found the wires coming from the fingers and did some tests on them. He basically found that in the fingers of the glove, there are strain guages. These are just a variable resistor that changes resistance when bent by the fingers moving. So you get a changing voltage output from the wires when you bend a finger.
His first step was to make some LEDs turn on with a bend in his finger. He found a LM339 comparator to do this. A comparator basically compares two voltages to find which one is greater. You can also think of this as a 1 bit A/D converter. You can also use an op-amp as a comparator. You can read more about a comparator at allaboutcircuits.com.
You can see his schematic above. He uses a PNP resistor to give a high output from a low input. After he got this to work, he bought a gyro mouse, which you can just hold, and move in your hand to make the cursor move. He wired his comparator into the mouse, and had a perfect working powerglove mouse.
I really like this project, and think that it is a novel idea. He turned a poorly functioning novelty into a very useful working project. I bet with a little more work, and a pcb kit, he could package everything into a nice little package. Go check out Brandon’s powerglove. [Link]
2 Responses to “DIY Power Glove Mouse”
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[...] It has been a while since I have talked about any projects from cornell university. I was just searching through, and found something that I thought was very interesting. Just yesterday I wrote about Brandon’s powerglove mouse from zerosign.net. As I was searching, I found an article named Air Mouse. This struck my interest, and I found the picture above. These guys took a girl’s prom glove, and attached an accelerometer to one finger. They also attached 4 buttons to the middle finger. They use an Atmel Mega 32 to interprate the signals from the sensors on the glove and to create the RS232 serial output for the computer. This glove has left and right click mouse buttons. It also has a on/off button so that the person can type. The fourth button is a scroll button. When this is pressed, the y position of the glove is turned into a scroll up and down. This glove has a neat way of movement that causes the cursor to move. If you roll your hand to the left, the cursor will go left, and if you roll it right, the cursor will follow. If you pitch your hand up or down, meaning bend it at the wrist, the cursor will go up and down. By doing it this way, it requires very little movement of the hand to cause a change in position. The only drawbacks are that there are wires attached to the glove, which seems like it would get in the way. Also, the buttons seem annoying. I like the variable resistor idea from the powerglove. But if you could somehow combine the two, then it would be something special. If you had a glove that was really light weight, and was wireless, and was very easy to move, it might actually be useful. I don’t know if i would like it or not. I think it may get hot. Go read about their project, it is very interesting. [Link] [...]
NEAT!!! I didnt mess with electronics for awhile now.. makes me rethink if I should start again