RoadTest: 3D Gesture-Controlled MGC3130 Hillstar Dev Kit
Author: gpolder
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: null
What were the biggest problems encountered?: difficult to setup, SDK not working with latest version of microsoft visual studio.
Detailed Review:
Below you will find my road test about the Hillstar 3D gesture kit.
In conclusion it is a nice and versatile kit with lots of possibilities, but I found it a little bit difficult to setup.
I think Microchip needs to improve on both the demo software, and the SDK.
Read on for details about hard- and software.
In addition I would like to blog about an application I'm currently working on.
This application is controlling the Arcbotics Sparki robot with 3D gestures using the Hillstar kit.
You can find the blog entries here:
I also made an Instructable: https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Gesture-Controlled-Robot/
The kit arrived in a neat little black and red box. I the box are three boards, an usb cable, and a couple of foam blocks and copper foil to construct a self-assembly 'hand brick' calibration object.
The three boards:
The MGC3130 Hillstar module.
Slot on the back of the reference electrode.
Hillstar moduke in place.
I2C-USB module connected to the MGC3130.
Overview of the whole setup.
The MGC3130 is a nice little module, which can be connected to an electrode on one side and I2C and power on the other side. The provided electrode has a slot for this board which gives a useful and firm connection. For experiments using a PC it is very useful that a I2C to USB converter is provided. But as can be seen in the images this module protrudes the electrode board, resulting in little bit weak construction. Also visually this is not very attractive. I think Microship should design a electrode board with slots for both the MGC3130 and the I2C-USB board. It looks like the kit is design in progression.
Having that said, my overall impression is positive, since the kit is very modular, and it is easy to test it for instance with Arduino or Raspberry Pi using the I2C interface, when you get the software drivers.
After installing the software and connecting the device, I got stuck in the initialization phase.
It looks like the usb-i2c bridge runs fine, but the MGC3130 Module doesn't.
After installing all necessary software I started Aurea, but it locked up in the following screen.
The I started it again and it reported that no firmware was available:
Then I tried to upload the firmware:
And finally I got a message that this is not a proper firmware file:
After some while, working on other projects and traveling abroad I gave it another try, and luckily I ended up with an working firmware.
What I did is depicted below, from the setup menu I selected 'Firmware Selection' and 'Start Parameterization' this way I was able to flash the firmware file.
After this, it looks like the board works, I could show some signals, but still not succeeded to get valuable data from it in first instance.
Next step was to do a proper calibration (Setup tab). It took some time to find out which receiver belongs to which electrode, but finally I figured that out and after doing Autoparametrization I got good signals. Back in the first tab, the 'Colibri Suite' bar-graphs were showing up in the Signal Level window when moving my hand above the electrode board, and also several gestures were detected.
Unfortunately the XY and XYZ window didn't show up, looks like a problem with the graphics library.
There is also a software development kit available. This kit consists of a Visual Studio C++ project with two demo programs. The demo programs runs in a windows console window, and outputs results values from the sensor. The compiled demo worked fine, but I was not able to compile it myself. The reason is that the demo was written for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, where I had the latest version, VS2012 installed. This sounds a little bit weird, since the Hillstar kit is brand new, it should be compatible with currently used VS version at least even not latest. Or else that should be compiled and tested on every version of VS. I spend some hours in figuring out that, I upgraded the solution, but got stuck in linker errors.
Then I installed the VS2010 Express edition, but now I got stuck in a Microsoft problem while the standard header files were not installed properly. This is a known Microsoft problem (c++ - Header files are missing from installed location - Stack Overflow) with two solutions: 1) install a fresh copy of Windows and afresh copy of Visual Studio 2) copy VC folder from a friend who has a good version of Visual Studio installed. Since I don't like to install a new Windows version, and I also don't have a friend with a VS2010 installation I decided to throw in the towel and wait for VS2012 support for this kit.
Furthermore the SDK also doesn't support other platforms, like Linux, Mac OS X or Raspberry Pi, to mention the most important ones.
