Week 8 Blog: Waiting for parts

Welcome back to my blog!

With my replacement parts still in transit for most of the week, I focused on refining the software side of the glove system, simulating hand motion, building out functionality for interpreting finger movement, and continuing work on key press detection.

I spent a good portion of the week expanding the dummy-data-based hand simulation in Unity. Previously, I had each finger curling in isolation, but this week I added full-hand motion using procedural animation across all five fingers. I also set up a basic virtual piano in Unity using 3D cubes as keys. Each key now responds to finger positions, changing color and moving downward slightly when “pressed” based on simulated joint movement. Even though I didn’t have real sensor input yet, testing these systems with artificial values helped me tune the logic and make sure the visual feedback felt realistic.

I also built a more general structure for receiving live sensor data from the glove once it’s ready. I created a TCP-based socket server in Unity to handle incoming data from the ESP32 via Wi-Fi. The idea is that once the glove is running, each sensor will send its current orientation data (probably in quaternion format), and Unity will read and apply that data to the appropriate finger joints in real time. The software now has placeholders for each joint’s incoming data and converts it to on-screen motion. This way, once the hardware is live, the transition from simulated to real-time should be seamless.

On Friday, the new batch of parts finally arrived. I haven’t fully assembled everything yet, but I began laying out the pieces and mapping out connections. My plan is to assemble and test one finger module over the weekend to verify that the IMU data can be sent correctly and interpreted in Unity. If that works, scaling up to the full hand will be the next step.

See you next week!