I'll start with a great image to draw you guys in before I explain further.
That's a somewhat Star Wars-y looking arm right?
I have a bit of a weird engineering/programming related background and I wanted to do something unique with my kit that stretched those skills to their limits. When playing Apex Legends one day I thought to myself "huh I can make
those rocket pods if I had some way to read the positions of my gauntlets." That started a few weeks of research on how to hack a VR controller to be small enough to integrate into gauntlets. The original plan was to chop up my old Razer Hydra controllers since they're the only system that's accurate while not using cameras.
But that would still be bulky, gets inaccurate around magnets and most of all kill a somewhat rare piece of gaming history.
Back to the drawing board.
Then simplification set in. "Do I really need all that accuracy and positional data?"
The answer is no. I'm pretty sure you can get believable movement from just knowing the
angle of the gauntlets (in relation to the backpack) which lead me to 9DoF sensor boards like the ones sold by Adafruit. They're accessible, somewhat affordable and best of all have a Python library so I don't have to re-learn Arduino code.
So, now that you're all caught up on my thought processes and the eventual end goal of the project you get a gif of what the arm would look like in motion as a reward:
I'm now in the phase where I want to test my code/motors, sadly the battery I ordered is taking its sweet time getting to me and I can't drive these super high torque servos without it.
I'm a bit conflicted about the design though, I might just switch to a thinner less R2D2 like design instead. What do you guys think? And how badly am I going to hate my life with at cons with several pounds of electronics in a backpack?
