Computer gesture control with Arduino and skywriter

I happened to inherit a skywriter from Finnian Anderson, and didn’t know what to do with it. I decided to hook it up to an Arduino Leonardo to create a gesture/shortcut pad for my computer.

The skywriter can detect a number of gestures including flicks, circles and taps. I assigned each gesture to a keyboard command, which gets “typed” by the Arduino Leonardo, using its HID capabilities courtesy of its ATmega32u4 (it masquerades as a keyboard).

After grabbing a copy of the library from here, I gave the skywriter a test and wrote a simple program to trigger different keyboard shortcuts on different gestures.

For incrementally adjusting redshift, I wrote a simple and hacky bash script, and assigned keyboard shortcuts to call it with + and – arguments.keyboard

You can find all the code on my github.

You can buy skywriters from here.