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Putting the Tap in "Tap"

A project log for TapV2

ESP32-Pico based, sensor-packed, kinda-silly wearable for not-every-day use!

xasinXasin 11/02/2021 at 22:350 Comments

Tap is a tiny device with limited capabilities to receive inputs from users.
Still, being able to somewhat fluently navigate simple (or more complex) menus and input forms to activate programs and interact with connected devices is quite important!

The video here shows neatly how I managed to still get such input methods to work on Tap, despite the absence of the main sensor:

https://twitter.com/XasinTheSystem/status/1455661802298150916

Initially, Tap was designed to use a gesture sensor with a 32x32 pixel grid of IR sensors, that could detect a hand waving in front of it to extract gestures. It can even provide a cursor position based on hand or finger position!

Alas, it was out of stock at the time of ordering the board, and is only sparsely available on DigiKey at the moment. 

As such, an alternative was used - the built-in LSM6DS3 gyro and accellerometer. This device features built-in detection of hard taps, and has surprisingly precise acelleration and rotation-speed outputs.

It, quite literally, allowed me to add tapping to "Tap"!

In this update of the software, I used the various inputs from the LSM6DS3 to provide simple but varied enough input methods to navigate folder structures through the device, such as menus!
It's not exactly what I was hoping for, but the component shortage is still about, and I can make do.

Once the main gesture sensor becomes available again, it will be a simple matter of tweaking the code to trigger forward/back/left/right gestures based on perhaps a combination of both sensors - who knows!

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