Last night Andy Gelme did a cool talk at Linux Users Victoria where he demonstrated a gesture recognition system that uses a Lilypad Arduino sewn onto a shirt and connected to an accelerometer mounted on a sleeve using conductive thread. Our cunning plan had been to use the output from his system to drive inputs on my Fake Keyboard shield to send keypress events to a host when he moved his arms around so he could control Frozen Bubble physically, but there was a misunderstanding about laptops: I didn’t take mine along, and Andy assumed that I’d have mine there with Frozen Bubble installed so we didn’t quite pull it off. It was cool though bringing the two bits of hardware together in the 5 minutes before the talk, plugging them in, and it worked first time! To make things easier for the talk I added some buttons to the Fake Keyboard shield:
Pressing any of the buttons causes it to send a keypress event to the host. I also had female headers soldered on so his Arduino could send events to it, but I took them off before that photo. It’s not as cool as using Andy’s gesture recognition system but just for the fun of it I fired up Frozen Bubble and had a game totally controlled from the Arduino:
