This week I repaired the glove and worked on connecting with the Arduino Nano BLE over Bluetooth.
The flex sensor on the ring finger of the glove stopped reading values. There was no variation in reading when the sensor was bent, so I replaced that flex sensor. We also noticed there was some calibration in the Arduino script we could have completed to make the transformation from voltage to angle of bending more accurate. Since we had to repair the glove, we will do the calibration before collecting the next set of data.
The Arduino Nano 33 Sense with BLE arrived. I tried for a considerable amount of time to upload a basic sketch to it, but for some reason, it won’t upload. I’ll continue trying to work with the new Nano next week. I also looked deeper into how to connect the Arduino Nano 33 BLE to the PC over Bluetooth. It turns out BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is not compatible with classic Bluetooth and is most easy to interface with over a mobile device. There are smartphone apps with the sole purpose of reading from Arduino Nano BLE’s or other BLE devices. It is a bit more difficult to connect and read its serial output from a PC, but not impossible. One of the drawbacks of connecting this way is that the transmission rate is slower. Once we get the transmission working we can test to see just how much slower the data streams are and if that will affect whether we reach our requirements.