IAT320 - FINAL PROJECT - Hand Glove

IAT 320 Final project - Phone Glove

CONCEPT:

The idea of our project is - a glove phone. It is designed for extremely cold weather conditions. People who are living in the environment that have seriously cold weather often have an experience of can not communicate with their phone in outdoor area. It is hard for those people to pull their phone out. Therefore, we have an idea about a glove phone which people can dial, pick up and hang up call with their gloves on. This idea is intended to create convenience for people who works or lives in extremely cold area.

Physical Form:

- For our target conditions, we used ski gloves as our base.
- Since users need to place ora + fona on the arm, we used bracer to put the technologies on.
- We used capacitive touch sensor for the dial keypad.

INTERACTION MAPPING

SKETCHES

PROCESS

1. Research

My contributions: I did the research on capacitive touch sensors and conductive fabric on Adafruit website. I knew how to connect capacitive touch sensors with flora(similar with Arduino) - Vin to 3.3v, SDA to SDA, SCL to SCL, GND to GND, and how to connect conductive fabric with capacitive touch sensors - the conductive fabric should separately connect to different digital pin.

Eloise and Nicole did research on how to use fona. The callback function built in fona library, and the connection with Flora, the type of batteries required.

2. Connect

My contribution: I used this capacitive touch sensors to connect to 12 keys which are made by conductive fabric. Digital pins 0 - 9 connected to keys 0- 9, pin 10 to hang up key, pin 11 to calling key.

3.Sewing

I sewed the keypad on the fabric, and connected keypad with touch pad.

Nicole sewed the fona and flora on the fabric, also connected them toghther

Iteration:

When I used thread to connect the touch sensor, I met some connection problems which result the touch sensor could not be found. So Eloise and I change the thread to wires.

Iteration

I found conductive fabric is too soft, so the status(resistance) could be changed easily when user move their hands. Therefore, I used another capacitive touch sensor which is a whole board contains 12 keys.

And we found the whole form was hard to wear, so we also changed the whole form factor, including the part holding flora and fona. A bracer to hold the flora and fona, connecting to the gloves which holds the capacitive touch sensor. And we made a cover to protect the keyboard, a small bag to contain the battery.

Keyboard with cover, Photo by Eloise, 2016 Dec

Bracer to hold Flora and Fona, Photo by Eloise, 2016 Dec

Small bag to hold battery, Photo by Eloise, 2016 Dec

4. Coding

I did the coding part of touch sensor. The number can be printed in one line. Then Eloise modified the code and combined coding part of Fona. First she is looking for how to save the number into serial. Then she finds that Fona calls the number by checking the array of characters. Last Eloise did the research online and found the way to store the number printed by keypad into array of character.