Controlling a Synthesizer with a Robotic Power Glove

Sam Battle's latest contraption is a Skynet-esque musical instrument that's horrifyingly awesome.

Jeremy Cook
4 years agoWearables / Music

If you’ve followed Sam Battle of Look Mum No Computer for any length of time, you’ve come to expect wacky musical contraptions. Controlling a synth with a Nintendo Power Glove would be awesome enough, but for his latest hack, he’s decided to not only convert the iconic gaming accessory into a gesture controller, but stuff an animatronic hand inside as well. This allows a synth to operate the robot hand, which plays another part of his highly modular system through the Power Glove.

Battle goes over the disassembly of the glove in the first part of the video, noting that three fingers and the thumb feature a bend sensor, with the little finger sadly left out of the mix. After offsetting and amplifying the output voltages, he’s able to control his input panel with the fingers, first varying LED intensities, and even commanding an actual flame. When used for music creation, he hooks up the ring finger for volume, thumb as note brightness, index as pulse width, and middle as pitch. It’s an awesome arrangement, though he describes the output as something that “sounds like a cat dying.”

The Glove is then put over Battle's new InMoov 3D-printed robo-hand, taking this input craziness to yet another level. While duplicating Battle’s exact project would be nearly impossible, his video is a lot of fun in his typical music-infused style, and there is a schematic available here.

Of course, you might be inspired to make some sort of spinoff on the idea, and Battle's quick to credit John Edgar Park with making a Bluetooth Power Glove MIDI controller. Lucky for us, Battle also provided a closer look at the inner workings of his Power Glove hack.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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