3D Gesture Controller
Created: Jun 01, 2016
No description available.
The technology today had gone through a lot in changing our way of life. One of this is the input device for performing operations in electronic devices. The input devices may include buttons, switches, keyboard, mouse and trackballs, touch pads, joy sticks, and touch screens. Those mechanical input devices have operations generally correspond to moving a cursor and making selections on a display screen. They provide limited control with regards to movement and making specific selections. The touch pad input device has improved the functionality and ability of a user to navigate and make selections in the GUI. In the recent times, advanced gestures have been implemented. Placing a number of fingers or gestures of stokes in the touch pads can do the functions and navigations. The drawback of this is that once the input devices recognize a gesture, any additional actions associated with new gesture will not be performed unless the entire hand is lifted. The MGC3130 is a 3D gesture recognition and motion-tracking controller from Microchip. It applies the principles of electrical near field sensing that enables user-command input with natural hand and finger movements. It is like touchpad whose input area extends 10cm upwards into space.
The circuit is made up of the electrode board, 3D gesture controller, and the I2C to USB Bridge. The gesture board has five electrodes; West Electrode (EL0), South Electrode (EL1), East Electrode (EL3), North Electrode (EL2) and the Center Electrode (EL4). The five electrodes are the boundaries of the sensing area. The MGC3130 controller has one transmit that provides signal to generate the electrical field (E-Field) and five receive channels for the analog signal from the electrodes. The I2C to USB Bridge is used to communicate between the MGC3130 to the host application. The PIC18F14K50 handles the message exchange and also used to indicate the communication status on a LED bar and to control MGC3130 hardware reset. The LED power is used to signal if the circuit is powered. The LED 1 or 2 blink simultaneously to indicate that there is no data transfer on the USB, if it blinks alternately it indicates that there is a data transfer on the USB port. The LED 5 is turned on when there is data on the I2C bus. The LEDs 0, 3, 4, 6, and 7 are not used.
The 3D gesture control can change the way we do certain action, like the normal wall switches of lights can be turned on by just using hand gesture with the 3D gesture control. The typical applications of this are in laptops, audio devices, air conditioning control, home automation, industrial, medical and other controllers.