Buttons and Buckets, my oh my!

So our ADC ranges were self-regulatory by the method of k-means, but we still had this problem of changing our bucket values too much when certain extreme letters were signed. We implemented a possible solution to this problem: have finite bucket ranges! For example, if the reaveraged bucket value exceeded the maximum bucket range (relative to the initial seed bucket value) for a given finger, then the bucket value would simply take on the value of the maximum bucket range. This way, extreme letters in the language do not pull the average buckets to values that cannot be reached with other gestures. This seemed to work much better, and certainly took care of our problem of precluding letters by evolving our buckets too much. Bucket, bucket, bucket, bucket. Phew, now that that's out of my system...

On to buttons! So we had been thoroughly avoiding the decoding of letters M, N, and T. As the image shows, they're almost the exact same hand configuration, with an ever so slight variation of which two fingers the thumb is in between. M has the thumb between the pinky and the ring finger; N between the ring finger and the middle finger, and T between the middle finger and index finger. The degree of thumb bending is not enough by itself to decode the letters. So we finally sucked it up and decided to add button sensors that would go on the pinky (M), the ring (N), and middle (T) fingers to tell the difference between them. The button was also used as an indication of U versus V later on, even though this is slightly unnatural for sign language. The addition of these sensors worked great for those five letters (M, N, T, U, V)! See the image below, taken after adding buttons to our glove. Definitely raises the cool factor by about 1000.