This week I assembled the glove by attaching the flex sensors and imu along with some cables. I also helped Kat with testing and calibration by wearing the glove. As I mentioned last week, we’re looking into using touch sensors to help identify some signs better. When I was deciding what parts to order, I chose the capacitive touch sensor breakout instead of pressure touch sensors like (https://www.adafruit.com/product/166). The touch sensor breakout is built as an i2c board, which means it can integrate quickly with our existing setup. The pressure sensors would have needed an ADC board and similar setup to the flex sensors, since both are variable resistors. We have enough funds, pins, and physical space to use an ADS, but I still chose the capacitive touch sensor because it seemed easier to directly set it up as binary touch/no touch readings, which is what I understood the design required instead of variable pressure. I also found that the size and shape of the easily available pressure sensors didn’t seem like it would work well with the glove — the circular pads were larger than a finger tip and seemed to get in the way, and the square ones were too small to work on the palm. With the capacitive touch sensors, I should be able to tape out conductive regions with copper foil tape and detect when the finger makes contact with those regions. The foil tape arrived yesterday (Friday 3/27) so I’ll use that in testing this week. I feel like we’re on track with the project, assuming we can start to record data soon.
