Alright folks, second work session in, and we’ve made huge progress. Last time I left off with a working hand moving demo, where I had the servos go off in sequence to match a pattern. Right after posting that log, I discovered flex resistors, which are basically variable resistors that change value based on the state of their flexion.

These things are similar to ribbon cables, and luckily they came with little rings I could mount to my fingers, essentially giving me an analog method of sampling the flexion state of my finger. I had these resistors form a voltage divider alongside a 10k ohm resistor, and thusly I was able to read the variable voltage formed at the divide.

I routed the voltage values to the analog input pins of the arduino, and guess what? …. 0.0, 0.0, 0.0…..

And literally, I was losing my mind trying to figure out why, because when I check the multimeter, the value seems right. After a bunch of back and forth, I noticed that the read function for the voltage was in setup, and not the loop. So basically, the code was reading the voltage at initialization, and then that value remained static. Stupid mistake, but one I fixed it, it worked.

From there I mapped the resistor values to pwm output, and thus the hand exoskeleton was born. My task for the next work session is to add a recording feature on the exoskeleton, to hopefully capture hand poses, to then save as signs for the ASL library to access.