Hi folks, I hope this is in the right place, if not let me know.
I want to build a glove with sensors on the finger tips and use a controller like arduino to detect when different sensors are touching (touching different fingertips together to thumb sensor).
I’m not sure how to go about finding the best hardware for this.
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!
Do you want to detect when the fingers touch anything at all? Or only a finger touching the thumb?
Only when a fingertip sensor is touching the thumbtip sensor. The idea is to bind different touches to keyboard and mouse events
You are basically building a set of four switches that have a common ground (thumb). In one sense this is “trivial” — just use conductive fabric in the finger tips, connect the thumb to ground, and each of the fingers to an IO pin, and there are many arduino tutorials on how to read a switch value through an IO pin. Here, to orient you to the tutorials, off is “high”, on is “low”, and you configure each pin to use the internal pull-up resistor.
I think the hard part is that this is sensitive to static and will probably die quickly.
So tell us more about how this is to be used. There might be a better way; alternatively you might have to add protection against static electricity — harder than you might think!
If you add a 5th switch with strings attached to the fingers so that at least one finger has to be bent past a certain amount, you can reduce the chance of false triggering from touching conductive material. I am not sure if that is a concern for you or not though and bending the fingers around something conductive may still trigger a touch. Of course then, having a switch somewhere to turn on and off the detection feature may be a good idea. That could be done instead of the previously mentioned idea or in addition to it.
Ok all interesting ideas for sure. Basically I want to build an interface that is very reliable and very low impact physically. I’ve ordered one of those keyboard glove things (tap strap 2) and i want to have an additional device to make more complex command combinations using the other hand as well. So basically a basic idea would be to map like shift, ctrl, alt etc keys to different finger tips and mouse click as well. One of my main focuses is to minimize the physical effort of doing these motions though, so maybe something more solid than fabric would be better and more accurate? I was imagining maybe small contact plates that you touch together or something?