High Level Design

Rationale and Inspiration

While brainstorming an idea for our final project, we decided to base our project idea around what we enjoy most about Electrical and Computer Engineering: computers. We felt that it would be interesting to somehow design a microcontroller based project which could somehow interface or communicate with our own personal computers. Additionally, we were originally inspired by a specific last project from the previous semester: a sign language translating sensor glove. This device was able to sense hand gestures and map them from a sign language alphabet to a standard English alphabet. With the thoughts of computer interfacing and hand motion in mind, we came up with this project idea.

The motivation for this project was to create an intuitive glove-based pointing device for multiple applications. The hope was to be able to create not just a working project but a fully-developed device in terms of intuitive functionality and practical, usable features. We note that past ECE 4760 project groups and outside hobbists have developed similar pointing devices, some glove-based and some not. While our end goals were similar to some previous projects, our intent was to only reference their projects as proof of the feasibility of our idea and ultimately to develop a more elegant, full solution to further the “glove mouse initiative”

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Logical structure

At a high level, our design consists of two main parts: a glove and a base station. Operation of our device begins with the glove. A user wearing the glove can use hand tilt orientation and finger presses to operate the glove. The glove senses these user actions via two types of sensors: accelerometers and finger contact pads. After the glove’s microcontroller processes the input data, it forwards a message a transceiver mounted on the glove unit. The transceiver then transmits this message wireless to a transceiver on the base station. The receiving transceiver forwards the the message base station microcontroller. Finally, the microcontroller converts the message into a computer HID user friendly format and moves the computer cursor appropriately.

Hardware/Software tradeoffs

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To interface our project with computers, we realized that we would be required to somehow implement a USB HID class device. During the planning stages of our design, we researched different ways implementing a USB HID and discovered that we could either proceed by doing this through software or hardware support. We came to the conclusion that our design would require an microcontroller in our base station in order to receive wireless messages and process the information. With this in mind, we decided it would be a more practical and simple to purchase a single hardware board that could perform both these functions. Almost too fittingly, we found a board that could perform the functions we needed and provided relevant example libraries, all within our budget. Additionally, we took into account the short time span we had for this project, and believed it’d be more effective to focus on developing our design than getting caught up in the details and semantics of the USB HID class.

Standards

Our design requires a computer to recognize our device as a human interface device, and thus our design must abide by USB HID specifications. This is implemented in the referenced USB mouse library used with our Teensy++ 2.0 microcontroller. Our design also features low powered radio transceivers using frequency-hopping spread spectrum. To follow FCC regulations, we use an FCC approved set of transceivers (this is detailed more below in Legal Considerations).

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Category: HOW