Project H.A.N.D. – The background

Project H.A.N.D.

As I was born in the late 70’s I grew up enjoying all the wrong 80’s and 90’s Sci-Fi movies and all the things we could achieve in the near future.
Nowadays a lot of the technology made up for those movies is actually around in some form.
And one of those things that returns now and then is of course a power glove. A glove giving the owner the ability to steer or interact with it’s surroundings.
That combined with the modern games and phones, provides us a already real world working base to start interfacing with. And today we call that augmented reality and now the world of IoT is slowly taking shape.
With that in the back of mind, combined with some presentations on IoT at work, I thought… I can do that.
And so it begins…….

After looking around what would be feasible and be both fun and even provides some lazy modern technology interfacing possibilities.
So I split it all up in several stages for proof of concept.

  1. The glove/hand itself. It needs to be light, strong, and easy to stick your hand in. Besides that it must look cool. So I’m thinking of either high tech future Sci-Fi white with blue and so on, or Steampunk. I think it will be the second one.
  2. Finger movement. I needs to be able to track the position of my fingers. So I ordered some velostat to start working on home made bend sensors. Something I wanted to try already but didn’t had a good excuse for trying.
  3. Hand position. It needs to be able to detect the overall movement of my hand. Just like the Wii controller or like your phone.
  4. Interfacing. It needs to have several options to connect to the realworld using the most common interfaces. This should include : WiFi, Bluetooth, IR, RF and yes… USB to keep updating the internals easy.
  5. Price. Yes… as with the lot of the DIY projects, it needs to be cheap. And I’m currently not sure what I mean by cheap but for now I set a goal between the 50 and 100 euro’s.

So next phase is to start working on the 5 p.o.c.’s and try to see if every step itself is feasible.
And I need to keep in mind to start using mostly already owned parts and stuff from around the house. Just to ensure the p.o.c. is not taking up to much spendings. 😉

Will add the followups soon.

Till then!!!
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