Myo Armband Projects
The Myo Armband is an armband made by Thalmic Labs. It is a gesture control device that uses eight medical grade electrodes to read the user's muscle contractions and assign the movement to basic commands (e.g. open hand, fist, swipes to the left and right). These gestures combine with an internal IMU to add hand gestures and rotational movement (e.g. a closed fist that rotates as if turning a knob to adjust the volume of your phone).
​
The Myo was not part of any school project, rather it was for fun. I took the initiative of purchasing the Myo as a development kit my freshman year of college to experiment with its functionality. The first project below is a simplistic android app to establish a baseline of 3-D rotations and movement. The second uses Bluetooth to control a 2-wheeled robot called the CEENBoT.
Myo Armband Android App
​
This isn't the most impressive app out there, but the idea was to create a visual representation of the pitch, roll, and yaw. The app helped me better understand how each of the three rotations worked in respect to the other.
​
Not shown: When I replaced the words "pitch", "roll", and "yaw" with their respective numerical representations.
Myo Armband
and the CEENBoT
​
Hand gestures control the robot via Bluetooth. The Myo needs a Bluetooth dongle to operate, so the dongle was connected to my laptop, which received orientation data from the Myo. A program written in Lua interpreted the data and converted it information that the CEENBoT could understand. The Lua program sent the information to the CEENBoT by writing to Hyper Terminal, which transmitted to the JY-MCU HC-06 wired to the CEENBoT.