One-armed Coding Using A Half-qwerty Hack

[Matthew Daughtrey] is going to have one of his paws out of service for a while following some hand surgery. Making a living as a coder seems a bit harder with one hand but he was able to find some solutions online only to balk at price tags reaching $600. He came up with a way have similar functionality on a standard keyboard with creative key mapping and a few auxiliary buttons.

The product he’s trying to mimic is the half-qwerty keyboard produced by Matias Corporation. It sounds crazy, but you can easily use your right hand to type all of the letters the left hand normally would just by mirroring the key locations. That big gray thing you store in your mellon and frequency put at risk handles this automatically. You should give the demo a try. We found that we’re quite good at it and only get confused when switching between the two halves of the keyboard.

But we digress. [Matthew] wrote a script that will mirror all the key mappings when he holds down the Windows key. He then hacked a second keyboard to extend momentary push sensors as seen above. He plans to use them with a partially mobile thumb after the surgery, or to build a foot pedal (we say build the pedal). An elegant hack that is a pittance compared to the official hardware.

Keyboard Input For PlayStation

Anyone who has tried their hand at RPG Maker 1 (or any text input with a controller) knows how difficult it can be typing long paragraphs into the console. [Thutmose] is here to save the day with Kupid 1.0 (2.0 in production). A PICAXE takes ps/2 keyboard input and converts it to a series of d-pad button presses for PS1 and PS2 controllers, providing quick data entry compared to the previously monotonous task.

We’re happy to learn that the source code and hardware is released, meaning it has the potential to be easily adapted to any controller/console.

Shredding To Street Fighter

Strumming to punch and changing frets to move, [Alan Chatham] plays Street Fighter using his guitar. It’s been modified to use OpenChord, an open source guitar controller package he developed. This was originally meant to be used with Guitar Hero and the like but as he mentions in the video after the break, it is open source so you can do whatever you want with it. In this case, he’s patched into a PS3, showing yet another way to use your own hardware on that console. Unlike alternative guitar-like interfaces you won’t have to relearn how to play. You just need to adapt your favorite songs to fall in line with butt-kicking controller combos. For the adventurous you can build your own but [Alan’s] got kits available too. Continue reading “Shredding To Street Fighter”

Mister Gloves, Gesture Input

This two handed glove input setup, by [Sean Chen] and [Evan Levine], is one step closer to achieving that [Tony Stark] like workstation; IE, interacting with software in 3D with simple hand gestures. Dubbed the Mister Gloves, the system incorporates accelerometer, push button, and flex sensor data over RF where an MCU converts it to a standard USB device, meaning no drivers are needed and a windows PC can recognize it as a standard keyboard and mouse. Catch a video of Mister Gloves playing portal after the jump.

While amazing, we’re left wondering if gesture setups are really viable options considering one’s arm(s) surly would get tired? Continue reading “Mister Gloves, Gesture Input”

Super Quick And Cheap Trackball

[Elgatoandaluz] has posted this guide on how to tear apart a standard optical mouse and build a custom trackball. He’s using a ping pong ball , mounted above the laser as the trackball itself, which seems like it would be a little lite, but functional. The case is scrap cardboard. We really like that you could toss this together relatively quickly and have a custom layout. He recommends using Sakasa Mouse for inverting the axes and X-control for mapping the buttons(direct download).

Midi Gloves

We’re being inundated with glove-based peripheral hacks. This is another final project from Cornell, keyboard out of the equation by adding 8 piezo sensors to a pair of gloves thereby shunning the pinky finger. We like this one because it’s easy to build and the midi interface implementation is well documented if you want to build your own.

As you can see after the break, this is easy to use with music software like Garage Band because it is a standard MIDI device. In addition, a MATLAB interface allows for custom mapping in case you want to change what each finger does.

We remember our first introduction to glove-based performances with Tod Machover’s Bug Mudra many years ago. We hope the music input hacks we’re seeing will lead to a whole new generation of music innovators.

Continue reading “Midi Gloves”

More Glove-based Interfaces

You may remember seeing the golf glove air guitar hack last month. Here’s two more uses for gloves with sensors on them.

On the left is a glove interface with flex sensors on each digit as well as an accelerometer. The VEX module reads the sensors to detect sign language as a command set. A shake of the hand is picked up by an accelerometer to delineate between different command sets. See it controlling a little robot after the break. This comes from [Amnon Demri] who was also involved in the EMG prosthesis.

Straight out of Cornell we have the SudoGlove, seen on the right. [Jeremy Blum] and his fellow engineering students bring together a mess of different sensors, sourcing an Arduino and a XBee module to control a small RC car with added lights and a siren. There’s embedded video after the break. You may want to jump past the music video for the description that starts at about 3:52.

Continue reading “More Glove-based Interfaces”