Hi! I’m a programmer by trade but without any hardware experience. I have a specific project in mind but I’m not sure what components would be appropriate. The idea is a glove used as a musical instrument. I’d like to have an acceleration sensor on each finger, all connected to a single controller, which in turn will relay the data in real time to a computer via USB. My main concern is having the sensors as small as possible so that they can be attached to fingers (most likely sewn to a glove), and have the lowest possible latency between sensor and computer.
What components would you recommend as a starting point?
The finger accelerometers might not pan out since you’ll have to account for movement of the hand, wrist, arm, person that the fingers are attached to. What I think you instead want to start with, or will want, is a way to measure the bend characteristics of the fingers but without those values getting influenced by the motion of other body parts (which can be measured other ways). Yes, that’s the ticket, a finger-bend-measuring hand-garment device. A flex glove controller.
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Thank you for the reply! My original intent is to use it for drumming on any surface. So I was thinking of detecting very sharp spikes in acceleration presumably when a finger hits the surface. I’m not sure a bend measure would work for that?
You’d be looking for spikes no matter what. For a stable environment and a stationary hand, the impacts can only be caused by a change in rate of bending. In other words, the bending IS the acceleration. Stable environment here means that things aren’t hitting the fingers which may cause an impact without any bending.
However, I had incorrectly assumed you wanted analog finger acceleration/position values. I’d imagined five tiny Theremins on each hand. Or trombones. Or both, what beautiful music!
Instead, it seems more like you want triggers, sort of like a keytar on each hand. And, yes, it might be easier to measure acceleration peaks for this since gestures, handwaving, and dancing can probably be filtered below the trigger threshold level. A gross hand impact like a high-five will be interpreted as five spikes. Caution: clapping causes cacophony.
Of course, a keytar uses a third input technique that might be worth considering. There is a button under each key which determines whether that key has been pressed. A second button can be used with the first to determine timing differences correlated to key velocity. For early prototyping, some basic fingertip buttons might be ok for a proof of concept.
“Clapping causes cacophony” - I’m stealing this for a slogan
There is an existing product called Mi.Mu gloves (in development I think?) which uses bend sensors for musical gloves, which is more like what you had in mind - used for more continuous changes.
I’d like to avoid buttons - the idea is to allow you to feel the surface you’re tapping on - and use different surfaces for their physical properties - e.g. hard vs springy.
What if I put a sixth sensor on the hand itself and use that to normalize / calibrate the finger sensors? Essentially do something like subtract the global hand velocities from the individual fingers.
woodencloset:
I’d like to avoid buttons - the idea is to allow you to feel the surface you’re tapping on - and use different surfaces for their physical properties - e.g. hard vs springy.
A hard/springy surface assessment from a single accelerometer will rely on measuring and analyzing force over time to characterize impacts. That's a much more interesting and difficult problem to solve than monitoring a mechanical trigger(s). Stick an accelerometer in a mallet head and see if you can get the math to work before proceeding to anything wearable or miniaturized.
I’m fine with solving interesting problems on the software side
What specific components would you recommend as a starting point? There are just so many options. Ideally without needing to solder anything as I have very minimal experience with it (and I gather it would make things easier to prototype with)
