Intention:
My proposal for the final project is to prototype on paper an idea for implementing capacitive touch controller gloves. Specifically, the project is to recreate the wonderful phenomenon that is the Nintendo Power Glove, except to make it better in every way possible. While it started as a joke idea, given time I would like to be able to implement this prototype in the future (and potentially update this project if it occurs).
Background and Design:
Originally a controller for the NES, the power glove was designed for two games that shipped with it, with the games and the glove not gaining much popularity due to the difficulty of use of the technology at the times. This was due to the heavy use of rigid plastic in the glove. Thus, the use of soft materials would be best to design a power glove 2.0.
In order to give the glove maximal responsiveness, the best type of controls for the pair of gloves would be capacitive touch. As a result, in order to also channel maximum hacker mojo, the gloves themselves would be fingerless. A quick google search provides plenty of long fingerless gloves which can be used as the base of this design.
The gloves originally had tilt controlling, which will still be used in this new design to replace D-pad controls. But in order to make it light and usable, a four pin accelerometer would be used, specifically to get values for x and y rotations, although z rotations would be interesting as a tilt mechanic.
But no pair of ultimate meme hacker gloves would be without actual buttons! Half a keyboard's worth of buttons would be placed right behind a standard set of controls. The controls on the back of the hand would be the triggers, bumpers, ABXY buttons and maybe an extra set of directionals. Half a keyboard worth of buttons would then be placed on each glove on the arm itself, allowing for the user to activate ultimate hacker mode to type. These would all be done with capacitive touch using copper coated fabric, for flexibility and maximum hacker goodness, and character inputs would be done via writing a 2 byte char that the underlying circuit would control. Silicon wire would be the connectors between all these components, with inputs communicated between the gloves to a single hub, which with bluetooth can connect to a computer.
Power supply (providing the correct voltage and current to a Lotus or even just an Arduino Uno) would be stitched to an armband on each arm, to make more room for power and to make the design look extra hacker bro. Neopixels and EL wire would light up whenever a connection is made, both for immediate feedback to the user and for extra Tron goodness.
Reflection:
First, for disclosure, this started as a meme. I always joked about having ultimate hacker type gloves like in 80's movies, specifically Power Gloves. However, after taking this course, I think I have the skills in order to make my dreams a reality.
To actually create these gloves would be a big challenge. The first would be to create a reliable circuit that passes keypresses as an ascii character for that keypress. To do this, most likely a prototype for a keyboard that can write ascii characters as an 8 bit signal would need to be developed. Second, after forming the keyboard, making sure it can run on a microcontroller with a power supply would need to be tested. Third, finding an effective way for the gloves to communicate with each other would need to be devised and tested (worst case scenario, I would just make one glove). Fourth, the gloves would have to be designed in order to make sure that the circuits would not break.
While there are a lot of difficulties with approaching this project, I still think it would be a fun long-term project that I could attempt. This would best be used for a cosplay over any kind of actual functional glove, although optimally the gloves would be able to provide input to a connected computer. What I love the most about this idea is that it would use most of the skills from the first two E-textiles sessions, as well as a combination of other IDeATe micro course knowledge.
Update: I plan to attempt this project potentially for Tekko 2018. Will update it if it starts to come together.
You can upload files of up to 20MB using this form.
