ReadMe

This was my Electrical Engineering Tech Senior Deisgn Project that was done over 2017-2018. 


Leap.py is the main file that was very very slightly modified from the leap motion developer. 
all adjusted was the x,y,z axis values for sending data. 
you have to have the leap motion developer and the leap motion software installed on the computer you will be running it from.
this file allows the other (new gesture list) to call the different functions out of it.


The new gestures list is the file that you define what you will be sending over sockets. 
first step is to get your ip addresses set for the computer your on and the pi that will be listening. 
then you set up which gestures you want to search for in the infinite loop. 
calling certain premade classes and variables from the leap file, we are able to distinguish the left and right hand, 
different fingers, and number of fingers. I used a series of if else statements as an easy way to distinguish between 
the different gestures I wanted. By seperating the left and right hand is how I was able to control the car and the mini 
claw on our project. For the claw part I had to use swipeDir and math.fabs to figure out the coordinates and variables 
needed for swiping your hand across the sensors. Then for each gesture that was recognized in the list, it send out a phrase 
over the socket to the raspberry Pi. 


The next file is called car-claw. This was hard for me to set up for the raspberry pi to listen for both the car and the 
claw commands and disguinsh between them, so I made 2 seperate files to be ran simutaneously on the pi. The first one listens 
only for the car commands (front back left right). The type of car that we had had an ESC (electronic speed controller) on it 
for the back motor since it was a higher voltage DC motor. First off you had to configure the values for the ESC to run. Set 
it for pulse width modulation and using the GPIO ports on the board is how I was able to control the speed and direction for 
the motor. When I first ran the code without know the frequency to run it at, it went crazy fast, and after researched and 
just playing around I was able to figure out that the motor was responding very well to controls in the 1500 range. It also 
helps to know the exact specs of your ESC. I set that as the speed variable for 0 or not moving. and by increasing it by 
increments of 10 at a time (up for forward movement and down for backwards movement) I was able to calibrate it at the speed 
that I wanted to use.


The steering was a little servo motor so I just set that at the neutral position which ended up @ 50Hz to be 7.5 to keep the 
wheels straight. By moving the variable up or down is how i was able to rotate the servo to go left and right. Then I just 
used combos of the above to go forwards and left or backwards and straight, etc. Each command was listened from the leap and 
then put out the controls.


The car-claw2 is the 2nd program I ran on the Pi to control the mini claw gripper. I was using an Arduino Motor Shield board 
at first to control the little servos, however, it seemed to be burning up faster than anything and causing lag/kernel issues.
So thats where you see the clawmotorhat file. The only difference between these two is to code to control the motors is 
used by a raspberry pi motor hat instead of the amspi board. For the amspi code, it was running the servos for a set amount 
of time either clockwise or counterclockwise to get the rotation/movement for the claw. at the bottom for the amspi code I
have stop all the other motors, becuase randomly the other motors would keep running. For the motor hat, you have to do a 
few more steps to initialize it, however, running to motors gave me way less errors than anything, and it was easier to 
understand in my humble opinion.



And there you have it. That is all the code needed to run the car/claw combo. 
Here is the video link to see how it works overall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weT6DzxxCMo
I will also upload a few pictures of the overall setup and some wiring in case anyone else wants to try it or give me any feedback!