MultiGlove

Have you ever wanted to measure the resistance or continuity of a wire but a multimeter was too far away, well now you can do that right at the ends of your finger tips with the MultiGlove!

What is MultiGlove?

MultiGlove is a glove that has a multimeter integrated within it. It can measure the Voltage, Continuity Tester and Resistance literally at the tip of your fingers.

What was our inspiration?

One of the Team members mentioned that their dad was an electrician, during the brainstorming process we kept that in mind. Whilst figuring out ideas we could actually work on, we came up with the idea of implementing a multimeter into a glove because it would be more efficient and simple for professionals in the electrical hardware scope/electricians. We asked a few electricians if this idea would be useful in their day to day use case and all of them gave us a positive review on this idea. After doing this census, we put pen to paper and started designing.

How did we build it?

A lot of methods and materials were used for this project, we had to come up with creative ways to implement everything we wanted this glove to have. We 3D Printed the housing required to keep all the hardware intact and sleek so it wouldn't be a nuisance or a safety hazard. We built upon an existing, extremely well insulated glove and added the hardware required to make this a working multimeter. The brains of this project was an Arduino Uno R3 because we needed it to have Bluetooth capability, the reason for this was we programmed a phone app that would integrate with the multimeter capabilities of the glove. The app is one way you can see the measurements being taken but we also have a secondary OLED Display which also relays the information. The way the measurements are determined is using Kirchhoff's voltage law & Kirchhoff's current law. The other parts we used were important to the build and can be found in our bill of materials. The total cost of the build was $84.97, this is not an outrageous amount, as there is a wide range of prices for a variety of multimeters.

Challenges we ran into?

None of our team members have ever experienced a hackathon/makeathon like this before, this was the first time we had to work remotely on a physical project. At first this did not seem like a huge problem but when the building of the project commenced, moving around the parts and prints between places was a major issue, it would eat out so much time out of everyone’s day because everyone lives in different cities but we still persevered. When the testing began, we needed multiples of the same component to verify they were working. All of our calculations were based off the 5 Volt connection on the Arduino, but when we switched to the Uno, the maximum voltage pin it had was 3.3 Volts, this ruined all the programmed calculations because we used Kirchhoff's voltage law & Kirchhoff's current law to obtain the rest of the measurements. To solve this problem. We just used a NodeMCU ESP-32 to give us Bluetooth capabilities alongside the Arduino Uno.

Accomplishments that we're proud of.

The one major thing we are proud of is working on this physical project remotely whilst taking the proper safety precautions during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was the first time anyone on the team has worked like this on something physical that required collaboration and outsourcing our parts. Another accomplishment was when we got the prototype to work which felt like we gave birth to a new born baby.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate during a pandemic. We also learned that during the pandemic, resources are sparse and we needed a 3D printed housing so one of our team members designed a housing and got his friend to 3D print it which was amazing. We also learned how to integrate Bluetooth from the Arduino into a phone application, creating a nice user friendly application.

What's planned for the future?

We’d love to implement an Ammeter to measure current, this project was just a proof of concept and thus we did not invest a lot of money into it. Also this design can be stored in a much more compact form factor. Since this was a prototype, the ease of use was not the first thing we thought about, so we would love to have an easier way to use the controls which would make this glove a user friendly device.

Built With

• arduino
• blynk
• google-docs