Hand Keyboard

portable Bluetooth keyboard that you will be able to use everywhere

As part of our final project in the HemdaMakers course, we were asked to develop a wearable project.

At first our idea was to make a glove that can control a robotic arm wirelessly using a Bluetooth connection. The glove will send values from the Arduino and the potentiometer to the robotic arm and as a result, you would be able to control the robotic arm.

While designing the glove and the arm we had the idea that instead of making the glove control an arm, the glove would be a portable Bluetooth keyboard that you will be able to use everywhere.

At the end we decided to make the keyboard and we called the project Hand Keyboard.

How the glove works:

On the back of the glove under the thumb and also under the index finger there are potentiometers that connect to the fingertips with a fishing wire. When you move your fingers the potentiometers rotate and send their values to the Arduino and then the Arduino transforms the signal to a character (depends on the values it received) and shows the output in the Arduino IDE - PC display, currently via the serial monitor, but in the future, we would like to do it wirelessly.

The potentiometers return to their 0 value thanks to the rubber band that is attached to the sensor with special parts we design.

The thumb act as a “shift” key that changes the letters that the index finger will be able to send. Think of it like the old Nokia phones, the thumb chooses the key and the index finger press it, each “button” have 2 letters to shift from and not 3 or 4.

IN this project we focused on designing the glove for people with disabilities that are not capable to communicate verbally and have the ability to move fingers a bit.

Project was created by

Rony zlatokrilov and Ben Epstein

Parts and Tools you will need:

• Arduino Lilypad 1 unit
• FTDI Adapter to connect your Lilypad 1 unit
• Glove 1 unit
• Rotary Encoder / Potentiometer 2 units
• Rubber bands - size 10 2 units
• Soldering breadboard 1 units
• Fishing wire 1 units
• Sewing kit 1 units
• 3.7V 500Mah Lipo battery 1 units
• Lipo battery connector 1 units
• 1S micro usb Lipo battery charger 1 units
• Step up module from 3.7v to 5V 1 units
• Silicon wires 1 units
• We print our projects with Makerbot Replicator 2
• We like Esun's PLA
• I highly recommend this Soldering station
• Print Rubber band holder - 2 units
• Print Potentiometer base - 2 units
• Print Potentimenter holder - 2 units
• Print finger loop - 4 units : Please note that you will need rescale it to fit your finger size!

How to build it:

1. Follow the Video to get an idea.
2. Use the images above as a referance.
3. Install Arduino IDE if you dont have it already.
4. Download the Project code and upload it using the FTDI. If you dont know how to do it follow How to upload code to Arduino Liypad.
5. Feel free to modify any of the projects files and code, Please share your remix.

Please share (: