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Glove 5-Mouse boom arm

A project log for Wearable Computer Rig & Powerglove Mouse

Inspired by Martin Magnusson's wearable computer, I've refined the display, and modified a Nintendo Powerglove to be the complete interface!

scott-sScott S 05/17/2015 at 03:370 Comments

Mounting the PSP joystick to the powerglove would be tricky. I had considered a few options for joystick placement, such as attaching it to the side of the index finger, a hinge that came over the top of the wrist, or even somehow adding the joystick to the bottom side of the thumb itself.

None of these seem practical. At i3 Detroit, the makerspace that I'm a member of, we had computer flight-sim joysticks laying around one day, and I realized that it might be practical to have a mechanism that replicated the top of a flight sim joystick, which has an ergonomically placed secondary joystick on the top of it. In order to retract it, and keep it in whatever position I wanted it to be in, extended or retracted, I found a lever-lock hinge on Mcmaster-carr. http://www.mcmaster.com/#1604a43/=x7pbl2

I replaced the lever with a wing nut to simplify the locking process.

After a fair amount of time cutting a piece of aluminum and bending it to conform to the inside of my palm- I finally had a boom arm equivalent to the flight sim joystick.

Another challenge was setting up the joystick wire bundle to avoid awkwardly contacting my palm while I was using the glove. I mounted the joystick 90 degrees from vertical, and did some funky soldering to connect 90 decree bent pins to rotate the bundle of wires. I zip tied the wire bundle to the side of the boom arm, and hot glued the bent pin setup to reenforce it, as it looked a bit fragile.

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