The new batch of Cornell University ECE 4760 Final Project are in! There are tons of cool projects as usual, everything from Human Tetris to this MIDI Glove Controller project by Anson Dorsey, Eric Gunther and Jonathon Smythe. The project is based around an Atmel Mega644 microcontroller which has lots of processing capability and all of the projects are developed in WINAVR/GCC. Since the system is outputting MIDI you are able to play any instrument sound you want, I was looking forward to barking dogs or meowing cats but the piano and drum demonstration was great too.

Thanks to Bruce Land for all of the behind the scenes inspiration for these cool projects!

“We attached a piezoelectric vibration sensor to each of 8 fingers on a pair of leather driving gloves. The gloves are attached to a microcontroller which processes the taps and outputs MIDI signals via a standard MIDI output port. Additionally, the user can select a variety of note mapping schemes and presets for the gloves via a user interface in MATLAB. Our budgetary limitations forced us to choose a sensor that was sub-optimal for our needs. The inexpensive flex sensors we chose are designed to sense vibrations, not pressure touch; they sense differential flex, so the output voltage level is directly proportional to how fast the sensor tab flexes. As a result, we had to compensate for the sensor output by performing a kind of integration in software. Memory was not a huge concern for us, so we were able to initialize several arrays to track the prior states of the sensors. However, state-tracking introduces an inherent latency to our project; for every prior state we tracked, 1ms of latency was added to the time it took for an action to turn into a MIDI message.”