The world is rapidly moving towards the mainstream use of IoT and AI solutions in people’s daily lives. Even though many industries have become fully automated, there are still cases where human-assisted machine control is necessary, even in places that are full of health and safety hazards for machine operators. This reality motivated a team of young engineers to come up with a cost-effective IoT solution which can be implemented in cases where certain tasks cannot be completed manually on the spot. 

Varun Sharman, Jival Jenson and Shijith Mathew created a smart glove with which users can control other devices from a distance. This technology can be potentially used for controlling robotic arms, conveyor belts, cranes or other equipment in extreme-temperature and hazardous environments. “Nero”, as the smart glove is called, is a project which yields remarkable precision and accuracy, despite its low cost.

“Nero in action” - source: hackster.io

This gesture-controlled smart robotic glove is based on the NodeMCU ESP8266 Breakout Board, which can be used with the NodeMCU LUA package or it can be programmed under the Arduino IDE for ESP8266. The project consists of two main parts, the transmitting side and the receiving side. The developers have used the WIZnet Serial-to-Ethernet board to publish the data received from the Arduino to the MQTT broker, as well as a NodeMCU to subscribe to the data at the receiving side. The technical steps for both ends are given in detail here.