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SNEAKY GESTURES V2

Wearable BLE-MIDI gestural instrument: 12-notes, 20 scales, aftertouch, flex glissando, X/Y accelerometer, LED display, patch save/load

michel-morinMichel Morin
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An open source wearable BLE-MIDI gestural instrument. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hAtGIP00vk https://github.com/sneak-thief/Sneaky-Gestures-V2 The thumb acts as a common electrode that touches conductive pads on the other fingers to play notes; a flex sensor in the index finger bends pitch, a thumb FSR sends aftertouch, and the accelerometer streams two continuous MIDI CCs. A 7-LED RGBW strip on the back of the hand displays the current mode. Built on a Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense. Transmits as a standard BLE-MIDI device — pair it with any DAW, hardware synth, or mobile MIDI host. Features: -12 finger pads - 20 scales, selectable live - Flex-bend continuous glissando sweep - Two-axis accelerometer - Channel aftertouch from the thumb FSR - Tap tempo with sub-menus for key/root transpose, BPM nudge, CC swap, and the flex-range editor - Tempo-tracking pitch bend - 63 presets, also via MIDI PC - USB Serial patch backup/restore - Timing quantization

The original wired Sneaky Gestures V1 was first developed in 2012 and based on the ACSensorizer / MIDIbox platform:

Development thread for V1:

I perfomed live on tour with V1 for a year for my Sneak-Thief project. V2 replicates most of the features of V1, with the obvious addition of BLE, LEDs, 12 notes instead of 8 and modal controls directly on the glove. V2 will be used live for my post-industrial / EBM project, INVOLUCIJA. Follow updates here - https://instagram.com/invo.lucija/.

Fun fact: Imogen Heap's team for her MiMu gloves referenced Sneaky Gestures V1 in their development blog.

Coda: the lost glove is happy

  • 1 × Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense
  • 7 × SK6812 RGBW LED
  • 1 × CD74HC4067 breakout PCB
  • 1 × FSR 0.3"
  • 1 × Flex sensor 3" / 78 mm

View all 13 components

  • July 2026

    Michel Morin • 07/04/2026 at 08:58 • 0 comments

    Update - July 4 2026

    1. To ensure snappy responsiveness, I went digging around the Bluetooth stack and found I could force the connection interval down to 7.5 ms - meaning that if your BLE host supports it, the glove can have 7.5 ms latency. Very nice.

    2. I enabled hardware low-pass filtering on the accelerometer (human hands are jittery!) as well as tunable software filtering on all the inputs.

    3. I also implemented MIDI CC data interpolation. In other words, I forced all sensors (flex/thumb AT/accel) to transmit all intermediate CC values, so instead of jumping from say CC 20 to 25, it would transmit 21, 22, 23, and 24 before sending 25.

    Together these h/w and s/w filters give a much smoother response to different hand gestures.

    4. Turns out whenever the BLE radio was sending packets, the data stream to the LEDs could get garbled and cause glitches/sparkles (maybe from RF power/ground rail interference?). I decided the LEDs should only update when the BLE radio isn't sending. It's not visibly noticeable because the LED data packets are only a few hundred nanoseconds long and that can easily slip b/w BLE packets.

  • June 2026

    Michel Morin • 07/04/2026 at 08:47 • 0 comments

    Update - June 21 2026

    For V1 of the glove, I had tried no less than 15 different fabrics before settling on Adafruit knit silver fabric. But now I'm finding more wear specifically on the thumb (because of the FSR there) so I spent some time looking for alternatives. Pure silver knit fabric would be great but omg the price.

    Idecided to try 200 mesh copper to see how well it holds up. fwiw it takes 1h to remove a single pad, attach fresh double-sided tape and resew it.

    While sewing the 200-count copper mesh to the thumb contact it was difficult to not rip holes in it with the thread. It works well enough but I may replace it with a thicker, lower-count (120 or 80) mesh because it might be too fragile - and the edges of the copper mesh were also snagging on the knit fabric on the other fingers so I also sewed a little frame of the silver knit fabric around it. 


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