Got the Nintendo PowerGlove working!

impressive, got any footage of it in action? hows the latency.

Getting about 22 packets/sec (one every 45ms). Gonna have to look at the timing diagrams to see if that's the upper limit on how fast this thing can go, or just a limitation of the (20 year-old) 68HC811 micro-controller. May redo the "decryption" interface on Arduino - that way more people could have a chance to play with this...

It's *very* early days at the moment (I've spent about 6 hours total so far). Once I've got something to show that's less corny than just me wearing an Oculus and a PowerGlove at the same time I'll post it... ;)

Whoa! I have a box full of these things! I guess I will have to add checking this out to my "To Do" list. 8-)

Any code available? Where do I find out about the "Hires" interface? (I do have a 68HC11 dev kit around here somewhere, and I was proficient in its ins and outs back in the day)...

He lives!!!! Welcome back geekmaster.

Been busy. Very busy. Just got a Galaxy Note 4 and a Gear VR is on the way. Thinking of ordering a DK2 as well. My "To Do" list is piled high, but mostly with really fun stuff. ;)

A big box full of IMUs arrived recently, so time to build a full mocap suit too, and starting to build a 360-degree 3D video capture rig too. But how can I pass up adding a Power Glove to the mix, eh?

Hi, it took a serious amount of "web archaeology" to find the original files (posted in the early 90's). I did save absolutely everything that I found, so can provide you with the schematics, 68HC11 assembler code etc. Send me a PM with your preferred email address and I'll send it to you. I repackaged the original .ZOO file into a .ZIP as finding a working .ZOO extractor was a job in itself. Some of the electronics components were pretty hard to find back in the day, and I ended up buying bulk and selling them to other members of the 'glove list'. I may still have some. I may even have a couple extra 68HC11's available if anyone else wants to have a go building a "Menelli Box" (note the spelling if you hope to find anything in a search).

As far as the code goes, there's not much to it. Open the serial port at 9600, N, 8, 1 and read bytes from it. Glove packets start with the A0 byte, so it's just a case of syncing on those and storing the remaining bytes. I've dug up some other glove resources for deglitching etc. and will probably integrate them at some point. Next on my "todo" list is using a (quite fancy looking) bit of deglitching code I found to do motion prediction for interpolating the "between" positions as the 22FPS position updates result in "stepping" instead of smooth motion. Otherwise I've found the glove is reasonably accurate and can handle "normal" hand movements fine. It struggles to handle very rapid hand movements due to the 22FPS sampling rate.

Here's a page with more info about the PowerGlove:

http://www.angelfire.com/ok2/stepinto/PowerGlovePage.html

Here is a link for downloading the original "Menelli Box" schematics etc.

ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/virtual-reality/powerglove/hc11/pg-hc11.zoo

What I am finding interesting is that even though the scale of movement can be different in the "real" and "virtual" worlds (eg. moving your hand 10cm in "real" world may correspond to 1m in "virtual" world), the brain is able to adjust quite easily and make relatively accurate movements (eg. placing the "hand" in the "virtual" world in a specific 3D location). Fun times! :)

I downloaded the zoo file, and PMed you my email address. Thanks.

@geekmaster: Sent

PS. If anyone is stuck unpacking the .ZOO file, it can be unpacked with the "The Unarchiver" app on OSX. It's possible in a DOS emulator or a 32bit version of Windows to use the original DOS ZOO extractor, but not on 64bit Windows.

OSX:
https://itunes.apple.com/za/app/the-unarchiver/id425424353?mt=12