GestureSense Sensor

Technical Electrical
1

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 Schoolcompeting 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/zx-distance-and-gesture-sensor-hookup-guide

2

Cool!

Our controls team did notice that sensor and debated putting it on our list. We were starting to read too much into the existence of items on the list and speculating about what the game might be that might involve gesture sensing…

Ultimately we didn’t get one either.

3

Looks like it also supports reading it over serial. It’s a very nice little sensor by the looks of it, I’ll probably pick one up to play around with. Could easily see a nice PID based alignment system

4

Some items on First choice are there because somebody donated them. Not necessarily useful for the game. For instance if I were to give First a ton of Lama tasty treats or a pallet of quacking rubber ducks, they would likely end up on First choice.

The sensor does look pretty neat.

5

I’d love to see FIRST students’ take on Adam Savage’s duck bombs.

6

We picked two of these up on FIRST Choice. I actually got very excited to see them, tons of possibilities for near-range object grabbing or self-aligning ability.

I’m writing some arduino code and building a mount this week that will incorporate both sensors placed orthogonal to each other to provide 3 DOF motion detection (Z gets double-booked here so I’ll probably sample both and average).
I’ll let you know how it all goes.

7

I just tried this sensor and get very erratic readings from the X axis, but the Z axis seems fairly stable. If I use a narrow object, like a finger instead of my palm, it seems slightly better, but still too erratic to drive a feedback control loop. I’m using the I2C interface, for what that’s worth. Has anyone else seen this behavior, or know what might cause it?