WiSHABI

The final project.

WiSHABI (WIreless Single-Handed Accelerometer-based Interface) is the project I created to complete of my university course. It was my first real exposure to programming microcontrollers and was a significant learning experience.

The hardware consists of two units:

  1. Transmitter
    • ATmega8 AVR microcontroller.
    • ADXL330 three-axis accelerometer.
    • Battery pack with charge controller.
    • 433.92MHx serial transmitter module.
  2. Receiver
    • ATmega8 AVR microcontroller.
    • USB Connector.
    • Detachable LED grid display.
    • 433.92MHx serial receiver module.

A user of WiSHABI would connect the receiver into a USB port and then the transmitter can be used to as an input device. It could be switched between two modes - mouse and keyboard.

In mouse mode the cursor would be moved by the tilting motion of the transmitter. Thumb buttons are used for left- and right-click.

To type in keyboard mode, the unit would be pointed into one of nine sectors in a 3x3 grid then click to scroll through characters. A similar concept to the 3x3 alpha-numeric character grid of a mobile phone keypad (this was pre-touchscreen smartphones!).

The receiver unit connects to a PC via a USB-B connector. The ATmega8 doesn't have a USB peripheral, so the USB HID implementation was done in code with V-USB.

An aluminium enclosure was used for the receiver unit and a broken cordless screwdriver body was re-purposed for the transmitter.

The transmitter ran off batteries but would still operate when tethered to a plug-pack for charging.

In addition to the photo gallery below, I also archived the following resources:

Report
(pdf)
Code
(gzipped tar)
Keyboard Demo
(mp4)
Mouse Demo 1
(mp4)
Mouse Demo 2
(mp4)

Gallery