Sign And Speak Glove

May 4, 2012 by 10 Comments

This wire covered glove is capable of turning your hand gestures to speech, and it does so wirelessly. The wide range of sensors include nine flex sensors, four contact sensors, and an accelerometer. The flex sensors do most of the work, monitoring the alignment of the wearer’s finger joints. The contact sensors augment the flex sensor data, helping to differentiate between letters that have similar finger positions. The accelerometer is responsible for decoding movements that go along with the hand positions. They combine to detect all of the letters in the American Sign Language alphabet.

An ATmega644 monitors all of the sensors, and pushes data out through a wireless transmitter. MATLAB is responsible for collecting the data which is coming in over the wireless link. It saves it for later analysis using a Java program. Once the motions have been decoded into letters, they are assembled into sentences and fed into a text-to-speech program.

You’ve probably already guess that there’s a demo video after the break.

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Glove-based Touch Screen From A CRT Monitor

March 7, 2012 by 23 Comments

Here’s a bulky old CRT monitor used as a touch-screen without any alterations. It doesn’t use an overlay, but instead detects position using phototransistors in the fingertips of a glove.

Most LCD-based touch screens use some type overlay, like these resistive sensors. But cathode-ray-tube monitors function in a fundamentally different way from LCD screens, using an electron gun and ring of magnets to direct a beam across the screen. The inside of the screen is coated with phosphors which glow when excited by electrons. This project harness that property, using a photo transistor in both the pointer and middle finger of the glove. An FPGA drives the monitor and reads from the sensors. It can extrapolate the position of the phototransistors on the display based on the passing electron beam, and use that as cursor data.

Check out the video after the break to see this in action. It’s fairy accurate, but we’re sure the system can be tightened up a bit from this first prototype. There developers also mention that the system has a bit of trouble with darker shades.

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Adding Footwell And Glove Box Lights To Your Ride

February 26, 2012 by 30 Comments

[KonaStar] shows us that adding some light to you car interior isn’t very hard. It’s just a matter finding some unused space and routing the cables so that they’re out of sight. Here he’s added LED lighting to the footwells and glove box of his car.

He managed to find some depressions in the molded dashboard of the car which were just the right size for a small four-lead LED. He drilled holes for those leads, and soldered some protoboard to them on the inside of the dash. This way there’s nothing unfinished to catch your eye, and the protoboard provides an area to host the resistor and interconnect.

There are switches in the glove boxes that turn the lights off when closed. These work for the footwells too. In addition, the LED lighting harness is wired to the parking lights so they will not come on when the car’s lights are off. Because he started with a lighting harness intended to add ambient light to a vehicle, the system responds to the doors being opened as well.

It’s a nice addition if you don’t mind pulling out several pieces of your interior during the install. We’re more comfortable with something along the lines of this turn signal hack.

Need A Hand Drying Those Gloves?

January 6, 2012 by 23 Comments

While being caught out in the rain skiing, [Andrew] was left with a pair of soaking wet gloves. Leaving them to air dry did little good, as after 3 days they were still wet, and blowing a fan at them did little to nothing to help the situation. Luckily [Andrew] had been thinking about ways to make a forced air glove drier for some time now using standard plumbing fittings.

A prototype was made similar to consumer models where the glove is fit over the end of a pipe, and while this worked great to dry the palms, it did not help the wet finger situation at all. In order to solve this issue a new design was whipped up featuring 4 fixed fingers and a movable thumb made out of copper pipe. A little drilling, and soldering was performed then the metal hand was then duct taped to the end of a hair drier, turning soaked gloves into perfectly dry ones in about three hours.

Wireless MIDI Piano Glove

November 7, 2011 by 9 Comments

Sometimes you just don’t have space for a baby grand. [Abdullah] got around this problem and built a virtual wireless MIDI piano. Unlike it’s inspiration, it’s not bad but we still love it.

[Abdullah] got his hands on some flex sensors and attached them to a glove. These resistive sensors are put through a voltage divider and sent to a microcontroller (a PIC16F778, we believe) and corresponding MIDI notes are chosen. These MIDI notes are sent to a computer and played over a speaker.

Right now, only a single arpeggio is coded into the microcontroller. Depending on which finger is bent shifts this arpeggio up and down the keyboard. That being said, the firmware can be easily modified to recognize standard piano fingering so chords can be played. The only issue is moving the hand up and down the keyboard.

[Abdullah] is planning on making his glove completely wireless with a microcontroller and battery sewn into the glove. Here’s to hoping he’ll keep us posted.

Check out [Abdullah]’s demo after the break.

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Second Run At Taser Gloves Uses Bug Zapper Parts

November 3, 2011 by 31 Comments

[Jair2k4] ditched the Altoids tins and found a new voltage source for this latest rendition of his taser gloves. Regular readers will remember his first iteration which used wrist-mounted enclosures containing the flash circuitry from disposable cameras to shock the wits out of someone with the laying on of hands. This one is a complete rework but it follows the same concepts.

The new shock circuitry is from a bug zapper in the shape of a fly swatter. We’ve seen these handheld devices before and dismissed them as a gimmick, but [Jair2k4] got his hands on a couple of them and found out they can put out a spark of up to 2300 volts. He set to work by getting rid of the tennis-racket-style grid at the top of the handle. He soldered on some contacts which reach to the tip of his middle-finger and thumb on some rubberized work gloves. The original handle was kept as it’s a nice battery holder and works well strapped to his forearm.

Does it work? You bet – even singing his arm hair and leaving welts on his skin. See for yourself after the break. And yes, this goes on the list of hacks you should recreate!

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Taser Gloves Are A Bad Idea

October 20, 2011 by 56 Comments

In a project that you’re sure to read about in police blotter someday, [Jair2k4] built a pair of Taser gloves that will shock your victim with they laying-on of hands.

Not surprisingly, this project was spawned from a conversation at work about what tech would best suit a vigilante crime fighter. [Jair2k4] suggested taser gloves, which drew a laugh, but also stuck in his mind. His prototype takes advantage of the flash circuitry from a disposable camera to step up battery voltage all the way up to 300 volts.

The gloves he’s using are rubberized fishing gloves which help ensure that he doesn’t shock himself. Wire travels from the capacitor to conductors sewn into the fingers and thumb of the gloves He’s got video embedded on his post that shows the bright spark and loud zap of a discharge when the conductors get close to one another. Altoids tins lined with electrical tape house the hardware, with a momentary push button used to charge the devices.

Hopefully criminals will not mind waiting for you to charge your weapons before they attack. But then again, [Jack Buffington’s] own version of a taser glove had the same issue. That one used conductors on the knuckle side of the glove, and involved long wires tethering the glove to a belt pack. Locating that back as a bracelet is a nice improvement on the idea.