Using Leap Motion to control a FIrst FRC Robot

[cameronaaron]

Hello my name is Cameron Aaron I am from Team 4019 Mechanical Paradise.
Our team has decided that we are going to use Leap Motions to move the robot instead of our normal joystick. I was hoping that their was someone out there that might have resources that may help guide us through the programming of the Leap Motion for this type of application, as I have never programmed anything like this before, I would appreciate it. My plan is to make a program that takes a zero position and then output two fake joystick-like values based on your hands position for example, Left X and Y are controlled by the hand’s forwards, backwards, left and right motion. Right X is controlled by the hand’s “roll” (tilting side-to-side) and Right Y is controlled by hand’s pitch (tilting forwards and backwards). Is there a good way to do this? I was also wondering if there's anybody that might have source code I can fork for this endeavor. We code our robot in C++. The current robot, tosses an exercise ball using a pneumatic system, in a similar style as a catapult. We mainly want to use the leap motion to drive the robot and shoot the ball.
Our current layout is a 2 motor 2 wheel drive system which lets the robot move forward, backward, left, and right. Our robot is controlled by a cRIO, which acts as the onboard computer. Two talons are used to control the motors. A relay controls the pistons to shoot the ball. We are planning on using this for offseason and outreach events. I would love to hear your ideas on how to go about interfacing with the Leap. I'm very new to the Leap Motion technology but I want to use it to its maximum potential. If for any reason someone wants to email me my email address is cameronaaron@team4019.org.

[cameronaaron]

I had originally posted this in the dev forum but I felt that this was the more appropriate group here is the link to the original https://community.leapmotion.com/t/using-leap-motion-to-control-an-frc-robot/1076?u=cameronaaron

[cameronaaron]

Here is a link to our github repo for this project I am still trying to figure out how to program for the Leap so no code has been committed yet https://github.com/Team4019/Leap-Motion-Code.

[ryanbacon]

Our FRC team (4293) is attempting to get this working in the off-season. did you ever get this working, and if so, how did you do it?

[Mizumi]

It can be done with minimal difficulty using a secondary computer on your robot (Raspberry-Pi, Arduino, Beaglebone, etc.) alongside an off-board computer running Leap software. All you'd need to do is write two programs (a server and client respectively) that allow your off-board computer to forward Leap tracking data to the secondary on-board computer.

You could then pull data over the router from the secondary computer into your cRIO. Ultimately, it would be similar to how many teams handled things like vision processing during the past few seasons. While this isn't possible during a competition (for obvious reasons, namely the Field Management System), it remains a viable solution for off-season events and outreach.

If you wanted to use the Leap -during- an event...you might be able to figure out a way to create a set of circuits that pull in Leap tracking data and output it over USB in a way that mimics the inputs from one of the Logitech joysticks or similar controllers. However, that'd be kinda risky for competition usage...

Hope this helps! ;D

[cameronaaron]

I came across this thread and thought I would give an update on what ended up happening that year I am happy to report this project was a success using my own Java code! Most of the error ended up being due to an issue in the compiler itself and once it was update my code worked like a charm! Thank you everybody for all your help and guidance at the time I was very new to Leap motion but now I find myself using it all the time for different projects! It's so interesting to be able to read my first day's programming this tech and seeing how far I have come