June
2006, Issue 191
Nontraditional
Cursor Control
ATmega32-Based
Motion Sensing
by
Andrew Sawchuk & Joseph Tanen
MOVING
FORWARD
The
results met most of our expectations. During the initial
design phase, we had planned to make the mouse detect
and position using the absolute position of the user’s
hand. But we quickly discovered that this was impossible
without using a gyroscope to measure and subsequently
account for possible pitching, yawing, and rolling of
the mouse. However, after we modified our design to
use the tilt of the hand to produce a cursor velocity,
we didn’t have any problems meeting our expectations.
In
future versions of this design, we plan to incorporate
an inexpensive gyroscope to account for gravity and
rotational accelerations in the lateral motion sensing.
Doing so will allow us to obtain the position of the
device in free space relative to its calibration position.
