

Show HN: My winning entry to the YC Hardware Hackathon, a force feedback glove - doctoboggan

My team designed and prototyped a haptic feedback glove.<p>Here is some of the technical information on this hack.<p>The fingers are actuated by a small hobby servo. I don't know the techincal details of this specific servo but it seemed to be a faily typical small servo. The servo arm is connected by twine through a series of braces to the fingertip. When this servo is actuated it pulls back on each finger opening the hand. All of this is hotglued to a work glove that can be worn.<p>For the demo at the hackathon we used a ping sensor to control the servo position. The closer the wearer moved their hand to the ping sensor, the more the hand was opened. But the idea is that any sort of sensor or data source could be used to drive the glove.<p>The servo and sensor were controlled by a Raspberry Pi running python. The control script can be found here:
https://gist.github.com/jminardi/5022297<p>And the servo control library is part of this package I wrote for Raspi hardware control:
https://github.com/jminardi/RobotBrain<p>TechCrunch interviewed me here, where you can see video of the glove in action:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/y-combinator-hardware-hackathon-winner/
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nandemo
That's really cool.

About the demonstration: I think it would be nice if the person were to hold
something, maybe a sponge or some other flexible material, so that the
gripping is more visible to the spectator.

A comment at Techcrunch mentions a established company in that field. So it
would be interesting to know if you're gonna compete directly or if you're
doing something different or more specific.

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doctoboggan
I had not heard of the company before the commenter posted it. I searched for
price on their website and could not find one. They do however offer 36 month
financing (!) so I think that says a little about the cost.

While this was just a day hack, I think I could make it more usable for a
price that does not require 36 month financing.

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nandemo
Clickable links:

<https://gist.github.com/jminardi/5022297>

<https://github.com/jminardi/RobotBrain>

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/y-combinator-hardware-
hacka...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/y-combinator-hardware-hackathon-
winner/)

