If you’re itching to play rock/paper/scissors but have nobody to play with, you can now with a glove designed by Steve Hoefer. However this is no ordinary RPS glove, this one learns from you and proceeds to crush your game skills by exploiting your weakness. The glove uses flex sensors on only the back of three fingers (which are the middle, ring and thumb) to read whether you choose rock, paper and so on. In fact Steve say’s that these are the same flex sensors found in Nintendo’s Power Glove. To judge the shaking of the hand before the ‘pose’, he used a ‘jiggle’ sensor that is basically just a little ball in a sealed cup. “When it's at rest in the bottom of the cup electricity can flow, but bump it and the marble rolls around breaking the circuit. Cheap and great for a lot of applications, but playing with a couple I found that it took far too long to settle into the cup and there was no way to set the sensitivity” Said Hoefer. There is also an accelerometer used to measure the shaking in each direction. The brains controlling it all and learning your faults at the same time is an Arduino Mini Pro that he coded with a special ‘learning’ algorithm. The final touch on the glove is the screen, which he used etched layered polyester sheets backlight by multi-colored LED’s. Also included on the glove is a tiny speaker that can be turned both off and on as well as a scoreboard. No longer will we have to play rock/paper/scissors by ourselves! For a complete run-down on Steve’s build please visit: http://grathio.com/2010/03/rock-paper-scissors-training-glove.html
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