Fun fact: Everyone seems to be nuts over machine learning, but almost no one gathers their own data. My training utility isn't technically sophisticated - just Tkinter, Pillow, Numpy, and Pyserial - but apparently most ML enthusiasts haven't needed to make one.

I'm pretty proud. I haven't made a GUI since Google Glass, and this one came out pretty nice.

 Here's what it looks like:

The idea is that I want to collect a few hundred samples of all 70 glyphs by actually drawing them in midair, the same way the glove will work in real life. That's the training data.

The left column shows the hand gesture up top and the currently-drawn path at the bottom. I made it fade from green to blue so I can easily verify the direction of the gesture. The utility automatically rejects any gesture that's too short or slow, to cut out false readings.

The right column shows the number of samples for each glyph, and the bottom has little thumbnails of each gesture. I can right-click one to remove it, which will help clean up the data.

At the bottom, you can see the status bar that shows the raw packets received from the glove, as well as the refresh rate. All samples are standardized to one second at 50Hz, but it's nice to keep an eye out for slowdowns that could affect the finished project.

I've wasted a billion hours wrangling the Android and Silverlight UI builders, so I was very surprised by the Tkinter library's productivity. The Python Image Library (packaged in the Pillow module) made the thumbnails and graphics easy, and serial comms are handled by the excellent Pyserial module. Numpy, and the Pyquaternion extension, simplifies processing the incoming quaternion data, but goddammit, quaternions are such an incomprehensible pain in the ass. 

As an aside, it's nice to be able to use an up-to-date version of Python, after being stuck with 2.7 on other projects. It has some relevant improvements (TYPE CHECKING!!!) but the updated libraries are also great.

Anyways, time to collect some data. When this baby hits 14,000 samples, you're gonna see some serious stuff.