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Linux Kernel Module For Nintendo Powerglove
antistatickid writes: "I've dusted off some schematics for a simple parallel interface to the nintendo powerglove (circa 1990), and have written a linux kernel module for the device since none of the old code works anymore. I'm hoping to generate some interest in homebrew vr: the gloves are cheap, and can be used for things like controlling midi synthesizers with the wave of your hand (a demo of which I've included on the project page)."
You can use this for interactive gaming pr0n!!
Too bad it doesn't have tactile feedback.
Nothing is more offensive that the foul stench of my feet.
Wow, some interesting things could be pulled off with a few synthezers, a Thermin and a Powerglove. I wonder if the Thermin and Powerglove would react badly together. This could be cool for playing guitar as well. Trigger odd sounds, or patch changes with your pinky...
Best of all, think of the applications for singers. No longer is them moving their hands around in the air pointless and retarded looking, but it could actually affect thing such as lighting and tempo even (of MIDI tracks)...
I can't wait to get a powerglove on Ebay now... but there will probably be a rush of powerglove bids now too
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I really had a hard time using the Power Glove for its intended purpose. I have an equally hard time believing that this particular piece of hardware will produce a pleasant experience in its new role. Anybody else remember how terrible these things were?
Has this been tested with the nes emulators yet? Punch out time baby! Props to anyone with such great potential to advance the emu community.
"I love the glove, It's so bad." -Lucas in The Wizard
"But the smell-o-scope is brilliant I tell you! Just think of the astronomical odors you'll smell thanks to me!
I can definitely use one these, ever since the unfortunate accident which robbed me of two fingers. You can't make this stuff up, people! Anyway, I wonder what this could be used for, maybe as a part of a 3-D filesystem? Add a pair of stereovision goggles and you've got a Lawnmower Man scenario on your hands (pun intended).
More information on the glove and its applications on the computer can be found at http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~cph/pg.html
Virtual Ascii-pr0n Wack-A-Mack nights a plenty with this gem of a module. >;)
Screw synths! You should be playing Black & White!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Or, make it wireless and use it as a remote for a TV. Imagine waving your hand to change the channel, volume, etc.
Connect it to your stereo in a similar fashion.
Use it to steer the lawnmower around the yard--just move your hand and fingers, while sipping daquiries from a lawnchair.
Think of the possibilities! It's almost like being a jedi!
(Insert obligatory pr0n and glove-powered "assistance" joke here.)
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Just like Mouse Gestures, one could have Motion Macros, move your hand in a specific pattern while typing, and have it insert predefined text. Depending on sensitivity, one could do really cool stuff while typing with the Power Glove on.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I was beginning to think we wouldn't have any stories that invited obligatory porn comments today! :)
I've come for the woman, and your head.
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I wonder if there is anyway to mod the Powerglove even more to make it wireless? (I am thinking of performance live)
Just hack open a wireless Nintendo controller? And use the insides of it? Use batteries to power the glove?
Electronics on the compenent level isn't my type of thing, but I feel that it's possible. Is it?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I'm curious -- in this age of the DMCA, could BYTE magazine publish such an article?
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Seanbaby has some rather amusing remarks about the Power Glove (and other useless Nintendo peripherals.)
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
As I recall, the original hack was done by Steve Ciarcia, who was working for Byte Magazine at the time. Now he runs an equally interesting magazine/website Circuit Cellar Inc. (http://www.circuitcellar.com/)
Steve has a number of projects that the average lay-person could do, including a touch screen for computers (used the parallel port). He also has a crapload of funny stories about "one-up'ing" his neighbour in some of his older books.
Beware TPB
Our school robotics club used this same glove to run out robot, guess what it sucks. The glove is too small, so if your 6' 5" forget it and in the 3d world it kinda sucks, we found that a joystick is best.
There has been a lack of variety lately in input devices for consoles... At least there's the DDR pad... and that's hard to get ... Come on, PS2 DDR. But there hasn't beeen a gun for the new systems, and why don't they use new technologies to revive the power glove. What's the state of driving wheels? What about new devices?
good job, CLIT rules claim some more for CLIT
I've certainly had this idea in the past.
Electronic music performance is really just a two channel mixer and a powerbook, these days. Look at DJ Spooky, Aphex Twin, etc. There is alot of work going into putting human elements in electronic music, I think the demo is a great idea! I think Alesis (Air-FX), Korg (Kaoss pad), and Roland (D-beam) are investing in this idea.
if you can get it to read in the different ways you wave your hands around, then voila! a great method for 'printing' sign language. even if you didn't need sign language, you can still learn it and type papers by the motions of your hands and now know how to communicate to a whole world of people...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
There isn't anything to circumvent (although I am sure that Nintendo would try to make some issue), so there isn't anything to violate either. And it doesn't lead towards anything 'evil' in their minds (DVD copying, Nonregioned DVDs, PS hacking, etc...)
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Very cool! I built this hack in like 1993, and it was hard to find a power glove even then. Now, it must be rather impossible.
A tip for hax0rs: The power glove is very SMALL (even the large one). I completely dispensed with the original glove that came with it to make mine. I took the control pad off and put a simple belt clip on it. Next, i extended the hand part and the ultrasonic sounders away from the controller with some 15 conductor cable. Finally, I sewed the finger bend sensors onto the fingers of a golf glove that went on the right hand and had the fingertips cut out (the original power glove is a lefty device.) Anyway, the idea was to get rid of the bulky garbage of the powerglove in order to make a little dataglove that i could still type while wearing.
I still have it here. Heck, I still have the monitor with the velcro on it! I'm very excited to break it out again and fiddle with this.
~GoRK
YES! I've been waiting for power glove and power pad support in linux. /. but neways I was able to get gamecon.c from the linux joystick driver to do my NES/SNES (and soon to be PSX and N64) stuff and for the actual MAME parts of course I'll be using a keyboard hack and real controls.
You see, I'm building a mega-mame, and if I ever finish it I'll try to get a plug of it up on
Now I can add a powerglove! I dunno how I can get it to work with the games, but it'd be a heck of a cool menuing system selection device...
THANK YOU l33t KERNEL[MODULE] DEV'S YOU'RE MY HEROES!
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
Oooh. Now I can be just like Darth Vader! I can Force Grip rogue processes! :p
Someone please port this to Windows so I can Force Grip the whole OS.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Next time you want to tell off that annoying co-worker but don't want to waste the time writing the email, program your Powerglove to do the typing when you flip them the "virtual bird".
Is it me, or would this work great for gestures in Opera and Mozilla? Move your hand left to go back, right to go forward, and up and down to scroll the document (not viable for pr0n).
It would sort of look like the video manipulation in Minority Report.
So now Linux is supporting the Power Glove. At this rate, I expect we'll see lightpen support by the end of next year. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
Hook ROB up to this and you have a glove controlled, MIDI device that can move small plastic pieces back and forth. This would be the ultimate in usless, nonworking crap wouldn't it?
Actually, the first thing I thought of would be to do a "Minority Report"-esque control system for X where you could move windows with the flick of your hand. Not sure exactly how you would do that code-wise (I'm no X11 guru), but it seems to have potential :-).
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I had a hard time trusting Nintendo for its controllers. The PowerPad was a piece of trash... Nintendo tried to produce a pad that you could actually "run" on by jumping on its "foot" touch sensors. The problem was that the sensors did not work well with an 8-year-old 80 lb. kid. It worked for someone who was heavier, but then their foot actually would come in contact with more than one sensor (it was not really an adult-size power pad).
Another controller that was absolute trash was the wireless controller. It would only work if you pointed the thing point-blank at the IR sensor that would sit by the Nintendo. If you were about 2-5 feet away (and pointed the controller right at the sensor), it would work about 90% of the time (which, mind you, is not good to have, considering that the other 10% of the time always seemed to come right when you were right over a pitfall in Mario or right in front of the boss...I get really pissed when I die thanks to a controller that wouldn't work when I needed it the most). Anything beyond 5 feet would fade in and out too frequently to ever want to mess with it.
I never tried the PowerGlove, but knowing the history of other Nintendo controllers, I'm glad I never had the displeasure to work with it either.
The PS2 has less types of controllers, but it has some unusual ones like the vibrating neck massager for Rez.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
/me looks over at his shelf, and grins at his powerglove.
However, I have heard that the parallel interface gives the system less data then the "menelli box" serial interface.
All we need now is a windows port. I can think of some nasty shapes I'd like to twist that paperclip into.
Its a little known fact that power golves with linux is the first step towards those neato computers tom cruise uses in the movie.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Top 10 Linux Adaptations
10) Linux Litebrite support
9) Linux dishwasher drivers
8) My Little Pony Linux kit
7) Linux on the Atari 2600
6) Linux bubblegum
5) A Tux vibrator (worked for Hello Kitty)
4) Linux for your coffee makers
3) Linux for Windows (Oooooh, that oughta do it)
2) Your Mom
And the #1 Linux application is....
(drumroll)
1) Linux for the Strawberry Shortcake Muffin Maker!
Damn, people, you've been a serious news rut. Doncha wish you could mod more than -1s? Kinda like I wish I could mod the freakin editors.
GOOD NIGHT EVERYBODY! I'll be here 7-12 Monday through Friday! Don't forget to tip your waitress on the way out ^__^
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I can then proceed to mod people up by virtually scratching my balls.
Good slashdot posts inspire thought, and in the words of Maynard James Keenan, "Whenever I get an idea my balls itch."
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
this is one of the coolest things i've seen on /. in a really long time, many thanks for posting.
as for the folks who feel a need to say 'it's stupid' or 'it sucks' or 'it's useless' so what? the guy probably had a lot of fun writing the module. he's obviously a big geek -- check out his site -- who likes hacking a LOT, and has found some creative ways to put that energy to work.
i'm such a clueless newbie that i probably couldn't figure how to get it to work without major help from some people, and forget about writing such a thing, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating the energy and curiosity that go into a personal project.
i think it rocks, now flame away!
http://www.baarbd.org - bay area adventure racing
Does anyone remember Keanu Reeves use of net/phone in Johnny Pnemonic? Seriously, take an old virtual boy as your 3D goggles, hook this thing up, and start hacking.
Well, probably not, but it would be pretty damned cool to dial a phone call using virtual buttoms instead of real buttons. It would be just like pushing real buttons only virtual!
Hey... wait a minute... no, I guess playing Mike Tyson's Punchout and Rad Racer are still the only things the Power Gloves is useful for.
You ought to make a program so you can force choke people in video conferencing!
"Gee, I think I'll adapt Linux to work with my [Insert any piece of hardware Linux probably should never work with here; Bonus points for obscure and antiquated hardware] !!! It's not like I have anything better [read: Life] to do..." [insert quiet, desperate sobbing here]
Hey look! My Karma is Excellent! Oooh, I'm gonna need help to change that...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Was a really cool, pre VRML rendering system, scene description language (with animation!) that worked really well on the old hardware. I got a powerglove working with it, and wrote a powerglove demo myself (there were a few examples out there). THose were the days.
with accelerometers dropping in price .. what's it going to take to build your own glove?
With the power glove (or something more sophisticated based on the power glove) it might be easier to type by using sign langauge.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
...Lucas - he's a pro with that thing.
...the other day at my local gamestop(e.b.), used, for just a few bucks.
is there interest in linking it to quake and doom games?
:D
at last, a 20 buck solution to my dreams!
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I know the interface that this was written for already exists (and has for a long time), but this could be quite useful for mobile/wearable computing.
Unfortunately, most mobile devices don't have a parallel port, but many do have USB.
Anyone think of creating a USB interface for it?
There are some cool (and cheap) USB interface chips out now.
(check out Circuit Cellar Magazine)
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
All I remember is... "Whoa! The Power Glove!!"
Speaking of ebay bids, that guy would have been smart to first buy up a bunch of powergloves and then post this article on slashdot and then post a bunch of auctions for the powergloves at inflated prices.
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Super Glove Ball was a pretty good cart to play with the Power Glove. I think it's the ONLY game that played fine with it !
I have three powerglvoes, and one set of the trancievers...time to dust them off!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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I use my Power Glove with this.
One of my friends when working on his master's in computer science used a nintendo glove connect to a computer for a project. He wrote code that interfaced to a VRML program that allowed him to move objects in the program instead of using a mouse or keyboard. I see something like this being used in CAD type applications. A user puts it on and moves & rotates objects to view them in other positions. It would be a much more natural way to do it than a joystick, keyboard or mouse.
Why hasn't anyone built a *REAL* dataglove for the masses yet? The PowerGlove is a lame-ass mockery of a real 3-space input device and is only good for use in simplistic games or other 'toy' applications!
;-)
... this is emminently compressible data, too, should bandwidth prove an issue (though there's always FireWire and USB2.0, I guess)
... remember light pens? (They're the same thing as a mouse, in a 2D sense, and you don't see many light pens kicking around today, do you? =] )
... but no time to spend on implementation), give 'em my email.... f00Dave@bigfoot.com
Wow, that reads like a Flamebait.
What I'd really like to see is a cheap-in-volume 'glove pair' input device (say 100$ for the MS version and 30$ for the Logitech one, like mice or keyboards) that would stream the positions of the fingers and hands over a hot-pluggable USB connection. I have a bazillion applications for that sort of device, and even a good headstart on a way to produce one on my own for about 300$ per pair (and a whole lot of time I just don't have). I'm sure *someone* has already had similar thoughts....
For reference purposes, my (rather fluid) specifications are for a system that:
- spits out positions of the fingertips accurate to 1 cubic mm or so within a cubic meter in your 'work area' (ie: a volume sitting above a traditional keyboard's location at a desk)
- tethered or wireless, as the case may be (wireless is an extra cost, of course, but not THAT much extra - it's mainly the short battery life that sucks for this)
- 60 Hz or better refresh rate for each of the sensed positions
- serial or USB input stream, similar to a 2D mouse's, only with a LOT more coordinates
So, why should everyone have one of these? Well, I can't give away ALL my secrets, but people laughed at the mouse, didn't they? =) A 3D desktop metaphor requires a 3D interface device, and 'air mice' sort of suck. Wands are only good for limited applications
How would you like to type on a virtual keyboard, configured any way you want it to be, anywhere in space you chose to place it? How about a 20-DoF controller for videogames? Music synthesis with 20+ DoFs, each affecting a different component of the sound (left hand for timber and right for pitch, volume and sequencing)? Just as the mouse hardware drove the creation of a billion 2D applications, so will 3D 'glove' hardware drive a billion more.
But only, ONLY if it's CHEAP. If anyone knows an electrical engineer that wants to work on the hardware end of a project with me (I've got the hardware feasability, sample applications and reconstruction algorithms mostly worked out
God, that was a lot longer that I'd expected it to be. Must be the heat. =)
.f00Dave
Give me the power mat (the one with 9 circles you step on in those athletic NES games) and make me a game to crush the M$ logo!
I was like 7 when these things came out, and I saw people using it on TV. I honestly thought that one could control the d-pad by hand movements. I was so let down when I saw a friends--it's a gamepad stuck on a glove. The only really cool gadget was the Nintendo Zapper--I have spent many hours trying to figure that thing out. I mean, with the technology had then, at that price, and being able to sense how far away it was from the tv? Whoa...I assume the light (phosphorized coat something or other hehe someone technical please explain this) from the tv made its way into the zapper. What did it do then? There appears to be very sparse electronics in the internals...did it accurately determine the position of the tv relative to the "barrel" and computed x-y coordinates based on that? Someone please help out I'm stumped...
Don't cross him; don't boss him; he's ridin' and hidin' his pain. Don't fight him; don't spite him; just wait till tomo
I love to wear gloves when stroking my hard hot rod. Once I program this glove I can really play Super Mario Brothers and get to the next level: Orgasm!!!
heretic! let's sacrifice him to our gods!
while i don't exactly think that recycling powergloves is the answer, i do feel that it's a step in the right direction
we need to put more of an emphasis on a more widespread use of VR
preferrably from the homebrew side, before some big corporation picks it up and patents it and we can no longer screw around with one of the coolest posibilities for computing in a long time
Base 2 yields only ARTIFICIAL Intelligence
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Jedi Knight 2 anyone? I'd love to use one of these for the force attacks. Imagine, rather than pressing a key to do the Jedi choke trick you simply reach out and grip.......hmmmm ebay here I come.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
I don't think the powerglove will affect the theremin at all (I play theremin, but have no powerglove or I'd test it first).m inworld.com/w w.e-bow.com/ .
The theremin reacts the your body's electromagnetic field. Touching a metal part of the signal chain (such as the case of a stompbox or rackmount effects box the theremin might be plugged into, or a metal part of the speaker cabinet). If the powerglove doesn't have any conductive surfaces making contact with the hand it's on, it shouldn't affect the tone. If it does, it might affect the tone a little, like shifting a specific point in the air a certain distance from the pitch antenna that's normally a C note up to a C#, or down to a B. I can get this kind of pitch shift by touching the strings of the Chapman Stick, a guitar-like instrume nt I play, when the Stick is plugged into the amplifier. I've tried using an E-Bow with theremin and it had no effect on the tone whatsoever.
links:
http://www.stick.com/
http://www.there
http://www.moogmusic.com/
http://w
you are obviously not a nerd...!!!
Find hot pictures of the BSD chick elsewhere.
Maybe then I could finally cast the god damn "Heal" gesture.
I might actually have a chance of working out how to use vi! :)
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX
at the PowerGlove sections of http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~cph/hbvr.html I see instructions for how to monitor the spacial elements of the glove... but what about the qwerty keypad on them?
I think they'd be FAR more useful if THAT could be put out to a RS232 port as well.
~Donald
~Donald / Just RTFM
The U-Force (i believe that's what it was called) It came out a bit later than the power glove and was supposedly a hands free controller for the good old NES. I had one, and at 8 years old could never get the damn thing to work, but i bet if I could find it I could now, and that would be a sweet sweet hack.
Forget music and videogames. All you need to justify developing this is an application that cycles through images in a directory whenever the glove moves or and down. The online porn industry will love you for it.
It's just... Well... You know... I was hoping for... May just News for Nerds, not news for ultra nerds... My Bad.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Here's a thought for the powers that be at slashdot -- when there is no news, post nothing. Instead, you come up with 'news for nerds, stuff that matters' such as articles on discussing whether diamonds are the right choice for your next romantic endevour, or how to use a powerglove with your linux box.
Did anyone else but me ever buy the Space Orb? It was a pretty neat device that apparently did not sell well at all and went into oblivion. It had a rubberized sphere that you grip with one hand. It could sense the amount of force and torque applied, in all 6 degrees of freedom (three translation, three rotation.) And it sensed the amount of force/torque, not just a 1/0 deal. It took two hands to hold it, but the hand not gripping the orb had plenty of buttons available for shooting, etc. It had a standard serial interface.
I bought this to play the game Descent, this was around mid 1996 I think. It had drivers to interface with games (I remember playing quake with it), but it must have been a constant support nightmare trying to get it working (and keep it working) with all the different games.
essential reality has a product that looks extremely interesting
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
We're talking about the era of 8-bit gaming here not the 21st century. The NES was one step up from the Atari, the video-game industry was still in it's infancy when these peripherials was designed. Sure they make MUCH better wireless controllers now, but where do you think the basis for these Super Peripherials came from? The shoddy NES peripherials of course! Sure the pads were a bad idea (which is why we don't see many similar ones produced today) but give them a break, they thought it would be cool so they did it. It wasn' so they dumped it. The people that created these peripherials were pioneers and innovators, trying out new ideas in a new market, which is why you can go out and buy a beautifully designed and implemented wavebird now :).
Of course I'm sure consumers would have been happier if the crappier of the peripherials (such as the pads) had never gotten out of the labs but we can't forget that this was before the days of the internet (well at least as a popular communication medium). If they wanted to see how people would respond to an idea (wireless controllers) they had to make them and see how well they sold, I'm willing to bet that the profits from those shoddy peripherials went into the R&D of better versions which leads us to the 21st century and all the neat toys we have now.
In short, yesterdays peripherials may have been bulky and error prone but they paved the way for the light and near-perfect ones we have today. Just my $.02
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
imagine any kind of 3d projector system, holographic , gazillions of colored laser beams, whatever. now imagine that they display the content of your screen. and now imagine that, when you move your finger on, let's say, a part of the projection where a file sits, your comp opens the file.
now I am far not hardware savvy to bring any smart ideas in how to do that, but I feel that this might be doable with such a powerglove.. anyone got any ideas?
Karma
Whats HOECS again? The fumes from my keyboard are making me drowsy...
Is a giant invisible robot arm and I can do the Darth Vader throat crushing thing.
Oh, and BTW, has anyone imagined a Beowulf cluster of these yet?
P0ur 0ut a little for my h0mies...
It figures, just as soon as this comes out, all the powergloves on eBay start getting 5-6 bids apiece.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I recall reading about a similar (identical?) hack using Silicon Graphics h/w in the mid-1990's. There were schematics etc. for hooking up the Nintendo PowerGlove to ports on the Indigo workstation and other SGi systems.
I don't have URL links to hand, but Google/Deja is Your Friend.
-- rik
Correct me if I am wrong, but... Why wouldn't this work with the standard kernel drivers? Vojtech Pavlik and Andree Borrmann have already written drivers for this, and it works with DB-9 or a DB-25. It works with NES controllers, PSX pads, SNES, and more. It works great. I have it working with my PSX pads at home. It even works with my homebrew arcade stick. Diagrams and Info are available here. This is a kernel module that comes with Linux by default.
Good, but crude instructions about using a gamepad in Linux can be found here.
It is important that you load a few seperate modules.
parport
gamepad
joyconsole
I think that there is another one. If anyone has any questions, just ask, and I will post what I have in my rc.modules file when I get home and have access to my machine.
When I was experimenting with the delay loops (designed for a 25MHz 386 - but I swear the didnt work on a computer of exactly that speed and make...) to control the glove thru a parallel port, but on a P166; I found I could get some really funky results.
In the only glove configuration I've seen, you get 2 bits per 3 fingers and thumb, 8 bits XYZ, 2 bits roll. But with some messed up timings I was getting 8 bits for the index finger (and garbage for everything else).
I've counted 11 for the fingers (including thumb), three for the hand itself (two wrist bending, one rotation; the latter could alternatively be considered as movement of the forearm, since it rotates the wrist relative to the ellbow), one for the ellbow, and two for the shoulder. Makes 17.
:-)
However, I indeed missed some: For the non-thumb fingers I counted only normal bending and movement towards palm, but you can also move them sideways to some degree (i.e. move your forefinger away from your middle finger etc. This would add 4 degrees of freedom, but since I don't seem to be able to move all 4 fingers into one direction at the same time, it's actually only three degrees of freedom (the three finger distances). Moreover, the robot hand obviously can operate each finger joint separately, while for the human hand, the last two joints of each (non-thumb) finger are coupled (you cannot control them independently).
I'm not sure how they get 5 degrees of freedom for the thumb (what is "middle" and "middle 2"?), for my own thumb I get only 3 degrees of freedom, one bending and two movement.
Together, we have for the fingers:
- each non-thumb finger: 1 bending, 1 up/down => 4*2 degrees of freedom
- between two such fingers: 1 sideways movement => 3 degrees of freedom
- for the thumb: 1 bending, 2 turning => 3 degrees of freedom
Gives together 14 degrees of freedom (instead of 11 from my previous count)
The robot hand on the page you cited (BTW, it would have been much easier if you had made the link clickable) does have 7 degrees of freedom more for the fingers, because each finger can move sideways individually, enabling the collective sideways move which at least I seem not to be able to do, the finger joints are individually addressable (4 fingers => 4 additional degrees of freedom), and there are those two degrees of freedom of the thumb I just don't get).
For hand+arm together, I now get exactly 20 degrees of freedom.
Given that we have two arms+hands, that alone gives 40 degrees of freedom.
For the toes, I seem bo have less degrees of freedom: All but the big toes appear to be coupled, so I just get 3 degrees of freedom for them together. Another 3 degrees for the big one. Add to this 3 for foot moving and another 3 for leg movements, and you get 12 degrees of freedom per leg.
For all four extremities together, I therefore get 64 degrees of freedom. Hmmm... does the fact that this is a power of 2 tell us something?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
or patch changes with your pinky...
No sensor for the pinky.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Check out The Gauntlet, a USB power glove by AGE. It appears not to be in production yet. Be sure to e-mail AGE and let them know if you're interested. (I developed a prototype of this glove for AGE a few years ago, as well as the original COP888 code for the Mattel Power Glove).
U-M Digital Music Ensemble
instructions:
Click the video monitor on the splash page, then (in the pop-up window) select the "Midi Glove" clip from the enormous pull-down menu under the screen.
Because of the VPL (Jaron Lanier) patents. Most of what makes a good dataglove is wrapped up in those patents. These patents aren't due to expire for a little while, so we are unlikely to see anything soon. As far as I know, VPL doesn't exist anymore - I can't remember what company holds the patents (one of those "patents aquired for portfolio" shuffle things).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
AFAIK, this is how a theremin works:
1 wire connected to loop / antenna.
1 wire connected to earth (as opposed to just ground).
Moving your hand closer/farther away affects the capactance between the earth and the theremin. In the old days you actually used to be a component in the circuit and not just an input device.
Anyway, that's probably already known. I'm no expert or anything, but I don't see how strapping some electrical thing onto your hand *wouldn't* affect the capacitance. So its only a question of how much. My guess is that if the powerglove has some sort of path to the earth, therefore either living at a potential relative to the antenna--which is fine if its DC, but not AC, i.e. not a serial device--and if you think its dc, you still have to take into account all the noise it might have--anyway, if there's no potential difference, then your hand will have much, much lower impedance with respect to the earth.
In summary, most likely you'll get a lot of extra noise (which may or may not be filtered by whatever theremin setup you use), combined with clicks or pops at powerup, and the range at which the theremin operates will probably change (like you might have to stand accross the room and run towards the theremin and back to change notes).
But basically the only real way to know is to test it. I wouldn't be too hopeful, though.
Under 2.4, when compiling a kernel module, you aren't allowed to do a "-I/usr/src/linux/include" to include the sources - you need to have the 2.4 sources installed properly and change the Makefile to read "-I/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include" - then it will work OK (provided everything else is set up properly in regard to the sources) - plus, I had a problem with the last line in the pglove.c source (MODULE_LICENCE("GPL");), which was causing some kind of error - I just commented it out, not wanting to track it down, and knowing that it wasn't a crit piece for the source.
Once that was done, the rest went OK - I fired up the module, plugged in PG interface (that I had put together YEARS ago, and it was last used on a 486 back in 1994 with Rend386 in DOS), and started the raw reader (a.out - default gcc output bin).
It worked just great, as expected (well, I was actually expecting smoke - glad I didn't get any).
Anyhow, my kudos to the job this guy did - while I doubt it is going to "change the world" - it is a good hack, and I am glad to see it pulled off (as a homebrew VR part-time experimentor).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"Almost every post" I make? Yeah right. The only reason there are TWO posts referring to my hand is because there were TWO stories relating to bionic hands in TWO days. And any innovation that can help a dude with 8 fingers is worth commenting on ;-)