The Nintendo PowerGlove was a great little toy that allowed all kinds of information about the hand to be conveyed back to the device it was connected to, which was usually an NES for games and the like. In fact, it was so cool that homebrew VR people wanted to connect it to a PC as part of their setup. Problem is: Nintendo are notorious for having very closed protocols, down to the non-standard physical connectors that they use. This makes it hard to connect them to anything but an NES.

The Menelli Box, developed by Ron Menelli was a solution to this. It was a design that used the Motorola 68HC11 chip (together with a little bit of other glue logic) to interface to the funky non-standard PowerGlove. Really, it was a PCB layout and you had to build it yourself. It had a big brother, the PGSI -- the PowerGlove Serial Interface that was made as a student project by the student ACM branch at UIUC.

You can still get the circuit design at:

http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~cph/menelli.html

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