Hacked Nintendo Power Glove Lets You Control A Drone Like A Robotic Bird Trainer
Nintendo’s impractical Power Glove has been the epitome of cool controllers for over 25 years, but an engineer has made the peripheral practical by hacking it to control drones! To use a quote to sum up my opinions - “it’s so bad…”
Ever since Lucas Barton fell in love with the Power Glove in The Wizard, we’ve all waited for a reason pull it out again…until now.
Nolan Moore has been busy stripping out the innards of the Nintendo Power Glove and replacing them with much more up-to- date components – control boards, individual finger sensors and Wi-Fi transmitters.
All of these upgrades have enabled Nolan to use the glove as a gesture-based controller for the Parrot AR Drone quadcopter – using his hand like a pretend airplane to navigate the drone through the sky. People love it, as you can see from the audience reactions!
But he’s not stopping there…
“The ultimate goal of the Power Glove UHID (Universal Human Interface Device) project is to revamp the 1989 Nintendo Power Glove with modern sensors and wireless communication, giving you the ability to use gesture and motion controls with almost anything you can think of, in style,” Moore wrote on his Hackaday page.
In the first version, he used the American Power Glove that was manufactured by Mattel. But when the second version came round, he had to use a boxed version of Nintendo’s very own Japanese version, which he had won on eBay… If you listen closely, thousands of collectors just collectively cried out in horror.
You can keep up to date on his happenings via the project blog, as he goes into great detail about every element of the process. Now you’re playing with real power.
