Power Glove Mouse

power glove

Feeling a bit nostalgic, Hack-A-Day reader Brandon has been hacking on a Nintendo Power Glove. The original Power Glove was sold by Mattel as a unique controller for the NES. It used ultrasonic sensors to determine orientation and could detect four different positions per finger. The finger’s resistance varies depending on how much it is bent, so Brandon used an LM339 comparator to determine the mouse clicks. For the actual mouse interface he used the guts of a Gyration mouse. He’s got a video of the beast in action plus links to an original Power Glove ad.

14 thoughts on “Power Glove Mouse

  1. My sr. design team actually built a mouse using an accelerometer and flex sensors (variable resistors). Unfortunately I no longer have any links to it online, but it won second place at the annual RIT design competition in 2005.

  2. Not bad, but I’ve been working on a similar project, and I found out a couple of things. For instance, it looks like it might be possible to get rid of the second circuit board that houses the “laser” for reading table-top movement. When you seperate the two boards, (they come apart quite easily thanks to several pins that fit into a nice plug) you can short two of the pins (i’ll look up which ones tonight and post again) and get a reaction from the top unit not unlike the one you see when the bottom board is in. Coincidence? Maybe. I still need to test it. But if it works, you could easily remove a good section of your project, AND cut down on battery drain.

  3. Not bad, but I’ve been working on a similar project, and I found out a couple of things. For instance, it looks like it might be possible to get rid of the second circuit board that houses the “laser” for reading table-top movement. When you seperate the two boards, (they come apart quite easily thanks to several pins that fit into a nice plug) you can short two of the pins (i’ll look up which ones tonight and post again) and get a reaction from the top unit not unlike the one you see when the bottom board is in. Coincidence? Maybe. I still need to test it. But if it works, you could easily remove a good section of your project, AND cut down on battery drain.

  4. in response to #4

    a single rate gyro is an accelerometer. very often is a piezo crystal, the stresses on it produce differences in voltage.

    a dual rate gyro, much less common is generally still an accelerometer but has electronics that can whip out some calculus to derive a drift plagued relative position.

  5. omfg! it brings back the days where you could plug it on your pc and control virtual stuff in rend386.

    ahh at last a use for that glove thats been sitting on my screen. cool hack!

  6. Although this is a good hack, it is a shame that the functionality of the buttons along the forearm of the Power Glove is lost. Those buttons could come in handy as part of the glove’s control capabilities.

    This brings to memory the “Nintendo Powerglove kernel driver for Linux” that I found in the “semi-permeable archives of sean whalen” at http://www.node99.org/projects/vr/ . This driver works reasonably well with my Power Glove, though it exhibits some jerkiness. I’m thinking of using the Power Glove for my robotics/telepresence experiments and may construct an interface to it with a PIC chip (sort of like a “Menelli Box”). This way the driver load is taken away from the PC and some basic data conditioning could be done to remove the jerkiness.

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