Leap Motion Wirelessly Controlling A Prosthetic Hand With An Arduino

Leap Motion Arduino Control

The Leap Motion controller is a rather impressive little sensor bar that is capable of generating a massive 3D point cloud and recognizing hands and fingers to allow for gesture control based computing. It’s been out for a few years now but we haven’t seen many hackers playing with it. [Anwaarullah] has messed around with it before, but when it came time to submit something for India’s first Maker Faire, he decided to try doing an actual project with it.

Checking out the latest Leap Motion SDK, [Anwaarullah] realized many improvements had been made and he’d have to rewrite some of his original code to reflect the changes. This time around he’s opted to use the ESP8266 WiFi module instead of a Bluetooth one. He printed off a Raptor hand (from the wonderful folks at e-NABLE) and hooked it up with some RC servos to give him a nice robotic hand to control.

The actual code being sent to the Arduino is pretty simple. The Leap Motion SDK does all the complex stuff, and in the end, just sends a serial command of how many fingers it sees to the Arduino in order to control the hand.

For more info about the project, you can check out his original foray into Leap Motion Arduino control here. And for more examples of Leap Motion controlled things using Arduinos, why not control a cute animatronic desk lamp?

8 thoughts on “Leap Motion Wirelessly Controlling A Prosthetic Hand With An Arduino

    1. More proof of the subjectiveness of personal interest. Several people consistently complain about “not-a-hack” articles, but on a day when like today, everyone spent their time being number fanatics, arguing over the merits of floating point semantics, arbitrary rounding, and the appropriate number of bits for a new format. Meanwhile, a genuine, albeit basic hack can’t get no love.

      Irony much?

  1. It seems to be really hard to add comments to this story. Maybe can we borrow a few from “An Improvement to Floating Point Numbers”, and the remainder will follow? I don’t know , that might create an inequality and result in an unneeded division in the crowd. Well, I guess that sums it up.

  2. ” generating a massive 3D point cloud”

    common misconception – the leapmotion doesn’t generate a point cloud. As a owner of one, I was surprised too. Their API seems to work out hand positions straight from a depth map, which in turn in somehow worked out from stero infer-red images. Hardware wise it (seems) an example of “simple but gets the job done” rather then that high tech intrinsically.

    1. I was about to say the same thing. The company is to blame I think. I’ve seen promotional images showing point clouds of hands but they were not from measurements, they were artificially constructed based on the pose of the detected hand/fingers. False advertising imo.

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