Leap Motion Turret

Inspiration

The Leap Motion seemed like a really interesting technology, so we wanted to incorporate it into our design. We wanted to make an interesting vehicle to interact with, so we decided to make a turret that we could rotate and move up and down.

How it works

Leap Motion captures the movements of an individual's hand movement's and categorizes the gestures into the different turret controls. Once they are interpreted, they are sent to an Arduino Light Blue Bean wireless Bluetooth controller that relays the signals to their respective turret parts. As a result, the turret rotates from left to right, and the barrel angles up and down.

Challenges I ran into

Getting the Arduino to function the way that we intended, limitations of the Arduino parts (the servo's don't rotate an unlimited distance as we expected), Bluetooth is quite difficult to work with in an IDE, 3D printed parts may not print as expected or may fail in the print of a machine due to a machine error. Soldiering fragile copper wires results in breaks.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Learning how to use CAD well (with no prior experience), learning ho to soldier, learning to control an Arduino, learning to interpret back-end input from Leap Motion.