GestureSense Sensor

[Mr. Lim]

Some of you may have noticed an interesting sensor available on FIRST Choice this year:



PROXIMITY/GESTURE SENSOR (FC16-103)
http://firstchoicebyandymark.com/fc16-103

I first saw this sensor at a hackathon called "Get Your Bot On" held at the Ontario Science Centre last year. I had 3 grade 9 students from Crescent School competing in the hackathon, and was there to mentor the event.

While there, I saw that every team was given this sensor in their kit.

The developers, XYZ Interactive, also had a representative there who demonstrated the sensor and was available to all teams to help them implement it into their designs, if desired.

All I can say was that I was very impressed - with the sensor itself, its capabilities, price point, simple yet innovative approach, and with the amount of support they were willing to give to the community.

I thought a lot about this sensor after the event, and wondered what some talented FRC students and mentors could do with this thing...

I decided to e-mail XYZ Interactive's CEO, Michael Kosic, to try and find out if they might be interested in sponsoring FIRST through a donation of sensors to FIRST Choice.

It looks like things came together!

Ironically, Team 610 was unsuccessful in getting a GestureSense through FIRST Choice... they sold out!

For those that did get one, I hope the sensor serves you well this year. It will take a bit of work to get it working, as there's no direct WPILib support for it, but for those of us willing to dig in the I2C trenches a bit, hopefully we can get some community produced FRC code examples posted here soon.

There's a fair bit of documentation on the SparkFun website here too:
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials...r-hookup-guide