Nintendo Power Glove Gutted, Repurposed As A Drone Controller

Despite almost being atrocious in its actual implementation, Nintendo's Power Glove accessory back in the NES days sparked many a hackers and tinkerer's imagination because of the possibilities it opened. Back then, however, such ideas were not easily possible to pull off. Fast forward to today's accessible and advanced electronics, the Power Glove has been put under the knife and the soldering iron in the name of science and boredom. Like this Hackaday project that shows a drone who's boss by controlling it with nothing but Jedi hand gestures.

Truth be told, the Power Glove here is nothing but a shell of its former self. All of its electronics have been removed, which made the glove just a fancy enclosure for the real hack happening within. It does, however, reuse the Power Gloves' original buttons on the wrist to issue some of the commands, like starting up the drone.

The box on the back of the hand houses the inertial measurement unit or IMU. There are also flex sensors on the gloves' fingers to read the movement of those digits. These are then fed to a logic chip that interprets these signals and translates them into drone commands that a ESP8266 Wi-Fi module then sends to the paired drone. The end result, of course, looks like magic.

It doesn't offer perfect control of the drone, of course, at least not better than the more fine-grained movements of a dedicated handheld controller. For a hack, however, it's pretty impressive. It also perhaps underlies interest in alternative, and probably more natural, ways to control drones, like Xiaomi's idea for controlling a drone through a smart wristband.

VIA: Hackaday