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Power Glove Updates, Maker Faire Bay Area

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on some improvements and extensions to my Power Glove 20th Anniversary Edition. On the tech side of things, I replaced the ugly 9V battery I was using with a low-profile, rechargeable Lithium-Polymer battery. I’ve updated the steps in the Instructable with new pictures and instructions.

I also re-wrote my Java-Unity bridge using a UDP socket. This is a lot more elegant than the text file approach I had been using before. Now the Java program acts as a server, reading in serial data from Bluetooth and broadcasting each line as a UDP packet. The Unity input manager then reads the UDP packets and parses the actual sensor values. This should reduce disk writes, and is more reliable, so I don’t have to reset the Java bridge as often. I’ve updated the code bundle with the new Java and Unity source code.

See me at Maker Faire!

The other big news is that I’m going to be exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area! Maker Faire is one of my favorite gatherings — a fantastic nexus of creative people making wonderful things. If you’re in the Bay Area, you can come try the Power Glove out for yourself this weekend, May 30-31, at the San Mateo County Expo Center!

As a bonus for Maker Faire attendees, I’ve finished adding Power Glove support to our most popular Blurst game, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari! I recorded a demo video to show it off:

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 22:56 and is filed under DIY, Flashbang, Games, Projects, Travel, Unity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Power Glove Updates, Maker Faire Bay Area”

  1. Andi Klein Says:
    May 27th, 2009 at 00:43

    Fantastic job getting the old Power Glove to actually be usable.

    I was just wondering, what’s the track called you used as background music for the Velociraptor Safari video?

  2. Andi Klein Says:
    May 27th, 2009 at 00:49

    Oh, duh.
    Sorry, I didn’t notice the track title you included in the video the first time watching it, because Vimeo’s controls were covering it.

    Again, nice work.

  3. biphenyl Says:
    May 27th, 2009 at 01:33

    Thanks very much Andi — I’m excited to let some other people have a chance to try it this weekend!

  4. Andi Klein Says:
    June 3rd, 2009 at 08:22

    What a great coincidence.
    After hearing Ladytron in your Power Glove video I checked out their website to find out more about the band, and what do you know, tonight I watched them play live at the Sydney Opera House as part of Brian Eno’s Luminance festival.

    Thanks for that. It was amazing and I had never even heard of the band before.

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