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The Tactigon, THE gesture controller

By on November 17, 2017
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Tactigon is born for the prototyping and developing of interfaces for gesture recognition and capture both integrated with environmental parameters; this board connects via Bluetooth and can be programmed through Arduino IDE.

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We are witnessing the continuous penetration of technology into everyday objects and equipment, and many Companies work to produce components and to integrate them into their systems; one of these Companies is Next Industries, which has developed The Tactigon. Next Industries was born to create connected devices and sophisticated designed monitoring systems; The Tactigon, its latest creation, is a smart device (Arduino compatible) that allows a controller to detect three-dimensional gestures and environmental parameters such as temperature and pressure.

It is well suited to develop user interfaces for electronic games, industrial and service robots management, advanced machine tools, drones and radio models. The board is ideal in general for movements capture and even for augmented reality.

 

 

It is a small board that measures just 46.9×15.2×5.5 mm, governed by a 32-bit ST microcontroller, equipped with BLE transceivers, temperature and pressure sensors, 9-axis IMU, RGB LEDs, battery charge controller for Li-ion, GROVE connector with UART and 5 GPIO. The board can be programmed through the latest versions of Arduino IDE (from 1.6.4 onwards, which allows the import of third-party’s boards and hardware) and libraries for use of BLE (Central and Peripheral Mode) are provided (from manufacturer), of RGB LED, IMU and other integrated sensors. The supplied IMU library is able to return quaternions that are the result of a calculation made by accelerometer, gyro and magnetometer values. In order to use The Tactigon with Arduino IDE, select the board from the Tools -> Next Boards menu and select Tactigon.

 

 

CONNECTIVITY

The board integrates a low power Bluetooth chip with an integrated PCB interface, configurable both in Central and Peripheral mode, thus providing smartphone, tablet and PC connections or with BLE devices such as sensors, actuators, rovers, drones with their Bluetooth service.
The micro USB port is mainly used for programming and serial debugging from IDE Arduino, but you can also recharge the connected lithium battery or power The Tactigon directly from it. Consumption is also reduced thanks to the integrated USB interface in the microcontroller, which saves the onboard presence of a USB / UART TTL converter. The GROVE connector exposes a dedicated UART line as well as the power of the connected device.

PERFORMANCES

The STM32 microcontroller combines the low consumption required for wearable devices and IoT with high computing power and memory: 32bit architecture, 32MHz, together with 16 kb of EEPROM, 512 kb of program memory and 80kb of RAM. As far as it concerns the sensor parts, there is the absolute pressure (and temperature) LPS25HB MEMS sensor, which has a range of 260 ÷ 1260 hPa and 0.01 hPa of resolution. -30 ° C + 105 ° C is the detection temperature range. The LSM6DS3 sensor deals with the 3 accelerometer and gyroscope axes: it offers ± 2 / ± 4 / ± 8 / ± 16 g acceleration scales and ± 125 / ± 250 / ± 500 / ± 1000 / ± 2000 dps angular speed scales. The six axes seen described before are supported by the integrated LIS3MDL, a 3-axis magnetometer, to increase the precision of the accelerometer and gyroscope pair. The range of this sensor is ± 4 / ± 8 / ± 12 / ± 16 gauss.

ACCESSORIES

Next Industries has designed also a small set of accessories to improve the use of The Tactigon, like:
• Tactigon Sharp; IP67 housing with dedicated battery space and additional dedicated shield ( LoRa, GPS, SigFox) and GOPRO-compatible clip designed for outdoor use (surfboards, drones, cars, RC models, vibration detection);
• Tactigon Skin; a glove where to position it, to detect hand movements without touching the PCB;
• management software.
Along with the Arduino core, libraries and examples are provided to familiarize yourself with the board. Short but effective tutorials are available in the Project section of the website (https://thetactigon.com/blog).

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About Boris Landoni

Boris Landoni is the technical manager of Open-Electronics.org. Skilled in the GSM field, embraces the Open Source philosophy and its projects are available to the community.

2 Comments

  1. Pingback: The Tactigon Meets GPS | Open Electronics

  2. Pingback: The Tactigon Meets GPS | Open Electronics | Aquaiver IT Solutions

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