The myth and lore surrounding the Nintendo Power Glove can only be matched by its monumental failure. The most geeky NES peripheral ever was launched with an amount of hype that would make the Y2K bug jealous. However, the Powerglove was doomed from the start. It required too much overhead (with the frame you had to wrap around the screen of your tv), lacked proper functionality and had terrible game support. Within a year of its birth, most Powergloves were relegated to boxes in dissapointed childrens’ basements. What was launched in commercials with Tom Cruise look-a-likes and had cameos in the hottest movies is now spending its golden years with R.O.B. in the NES graveyard - but no more. The time has come to bring new life into our old friend and to welcome him back as a productive member of society with the ‘Powerglove Mouse’. With this hack I can strap on the Powerglove and have total control over the mouse cursor on my computer. I can control the cursor’s position with a wave of my hand and activate the mouse clicks by simply bending my fingers - a beautiful integration of old and new. Note: While the electronics used here aren’t that difficult to understand, the soldering is a little tricky. There is some expensive equipment used in this process and one slight twitch of a soldering iron can easily send a $50 gyration mouse to its demise, so be careful and don’t blame me if your home explodes while attempting the process below. The first step in making the pMouse is, of course, taking all the goods apart. I started with the component of the powerglove on the back of the hand. Once the black plastic casing is removed you can see the circuit board inside with lots of wires going to both the fingers and the arm portion of the Powerglove circuitry. If you can manage to flip the board over without dissconnecting any wires, you will be able to see where the finger sensors are connected. Basically, all the fingers are are variable resistors. When a finger is bent the resistance through the finger is increased. For this project I created my own simple circuit (shown above) that will activate a mouse click whenever one of the fingers is bent. To accomplish this, I used an LM339 comparator chip to function as a 1-bit analog to digital converter. I then connected the outputs of the comparators to the base of two PNP transistors. The collector and emitter of the transistors would then be connected to the mouse buttons. Thus, when the thumb is bent, a ‘left-click’ action will occur and when the pointer finger is bent a ‘right-click’ action will occur. The other fingers could be utilized if you wanted for extended functions but for my mouse, I only wired up these two finger actions. In the schematic above, Rx and Ry represent the thumb and pointer fingers respectively. Also, the schematic shows that LEDs, rather than the mouse buttons, are connected across the transistor for testing purposes. I plugged in the mouse buttons after I had evidence that the circuit actually worked. However, before I began to assemble the above circuit, I wanted to access the fingers so that I knew the resistance range that I was dealing with. Using a multimeter I tested each of these points (pictured above) to find which two points corresponded to which finger. I held the meter probes to two points at a time and systematically bent each finger. I repeated this process until I figured out which two points were connected to which finger. I labeled these points and then measured the resistance increase of each finger as it was bent. The thumb’s resistance increased from 300k to 900k while the pointer finger’s resistance increased from 100k to 400k. With these figures in hand I knew the value of resistance needed to implement in my curcuit above. R1 = 1k R2 = 300k R3 = 100k I then wired the circuit up on a solderless breadboard and tested to see if I could control two LED’s with bending the fingers. Above is the circuit after it was wired. After a little troubleshooting, everything worked fine, and I was successfully able to turn on the LED’s simply by bending the fingers. Once I had the finger situation under control, I moved on to the portion of the project that was to control the movement of the mouse cursor. I thought of a few ways to accomplish this. I could use the original sound-detecting frame that came with the powerglove and monitor the movement of the glove the way it was intended. However, this would have required me to write software to interpret the data signals coming from the glove and translate them into mouse actions on my computer - I really didn’t want to do that. The next idea I thought of was to simply use a gyration mouse that already sensed motion and did all the translating/mouse interpretation for me. I decided to go this route and got a cheap mouse off eBay for about $50. To achieve the desired functionality with this mouse, all I needed to do was take the casing of the mouse off and hijack the mouse buttons to connect with my finger-bending-circuit. Above is the gyration mouse that I used. This is the underside of the gyration mouse and the place where I needed to solder to hijack the mouse buttons. The picture above shows where I had to solder to hijack the right-click button and the motion trigger (which would later simply be shorted for better functionality). I soldered the wires here to connect my finger-bending-circuit so that whenever the appropriate fingers were bent, the mouse button would be activated. I also had to solder two wires to hijack the left-click button (not shown). One very important step is to make sure that both the gyration mouse and my breadboard circuit share a common ground. Since my circuit runs off a 9v and the mouse uses 3 AAA’s this is vital. Above is where the battery pack used to connect to the mouse. The node on the far right is the one that connects to ground and has to be connected to ground on the breadboard as well. Once all the tedious work was down, I began to piece my glove together. You can see that this baby is a beast. After some cleaning up, I hooked up the gyration receiver to my computer and tested her out. Success! Besides looking amazingly geeky cool, the motion was detected and the fingers actually controlled the mouse clicks! I felt like I was in 1988 again playing with the Powerglove for the very first time. Welcome back, buddy. Source of this intresting hack : http://www.zerosign.net/index.php/powerglove-mouse/
Is this another one of your mods? Very nice mod, indeed! Looks like something from Honey I Shrunk the Kids!
LOL, of that reminds me of Nightmare On Elmstreet where Freddy says "oh you forgot THE POWERGLOVE" Sorry for laughing, since I really like the comedic Nightmare On Elmstreet films/movies
No I didnt make this one, But I have to get around finshing my Jaguar tv remote -_- Nes remote wasent my idea neather but I did make it
It's like a borg prop from Star Trek! Fair play mind, nice bit of work, even if you have to wonder "why?" I have a PS1 glove somewhere, wonder if I can control my toaster with it?
