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Twitter Brought Me Back

A project log for e-NABLE Phone Home

Let's add IoT to e-NABLE assistive devices.

les-hallLes Hall 05/10/2017 at 22:470 Comments

There I was, MacBook in front of me, 3D printer at my side, and lab bench over there when I saw something that seemed rather astonishing. It was an email from Twitter about my long abandoned twitter account informing me that there were nearly 20 notifications waiting for me to read. This piqued my curiosity so I recovered my password and had a look.

All but the first two were Hackaday tweeting this project. Now that may not be a huge amount of attention and I bet they do that for all the projects, haha, but it really made me feel good about things. It was like something mattered at e-NABLE again, my world became a little brighter, and Hackaday suddenly became a focus! So here I am.

But you don't want to read all that gobbledygook without a grinding down home tech update, do you? So I'm back with an update for you. What happened is the project basically ground to a screeching halt, sadly, when I sent the prototypes to e-NABLE's Rochester headquarters.

Nothing against Rochester, mind you, it's just that I seem to have made the hand too complicated for easy operation. Maybe I'll get into details about why that was, and truth be told the *other half* of the project, the motion sensor, was never tested, it's just that regardless of how things played out the project seems to warrant revitalized attention.

To that end, I think I'll take my Re-NABLE (Rochester e-NABLE) contact's offer of having the hardware mailed back to me. I won't wait for that though. The next step is to make sure a GitHub repository exists for both projects (thanks GitHub for making your process easy enough that even I could figure out how to use it, lol). After that I guess I'll begin rewriting the code for ease of use.

I'll also need to purchase some hardware to do the job, for which the Feather line of products from Adafruit is well suited. Specifically the HUZZAH Feather is on task because it has the famous ESP8266 device on-board, plus USB link, battery management, and small form factor well suited for mounting on an e-NABLE hand.

Oh, and I mustn't forget - a hand must be selected and modified for mounting the hardware. I have a LIPO battery, so that's good. Just need to get a hardware order in and get started on the project!

Les out, praise the Lord!

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