Fun with the Myo gesture controller

Myo is a wireless armband that uses electromyography to detect and recognize hand gestures. When paired with a computer or smartphone, gestures can be used to trigger various application-specific functions.

When their marketing video made the rounds in 2013, I remember one specific demo made my jaw drop: touch-free video control. The video shows a man watching a cooking instructional video while cutting some raw meat. Being able to pause and rewind the video simply by raising his hand was a solution to an interaction problem I’ve had countless times, such as listening to podcasts while doing chores, or watching videos while eating a sandwich.

I ordered a Myo back in March 2013 and deferred shipment until their consumer design was ready. It was a nice surprise to return home from holiday travels to find a Myo waiting for me. :)

Unfortunately there is no official Linux support yet (though there’s a proof of concept from a hackathon). On Windows and OSX, there’s a pretty elegant Lua scripting environment in the SDK which is used to write “connector” integrations. Lua scripts are selected based on the currently active app to trigger mouse/keyboard actions from gestures. This is a neat approach. It enables developers and tinkerers to do a bunch of the legwork writing and designing integrations, while wrapping the complex parts (gesture recognition / mouse control / keyboard automation) in a cross-platform manner.

I was happy to see some web browser integration already built, but upon further inspection there were a few different behaviors which would be more to my liking. I was delighted to discover that I could simply open up the web browser connector and hack the high-level Lua code into the controls I wanted. I added a gesture to take control of the mouse, as well as some special cases for controlling video playback.

While the gesture recognition doesn’t always work perfectly (probably a matter of training both myself and the armband better), when everything works properly, the results are pretty sublime:

I’ll be posting my scripts and future tinkerings in a myo-scripts repo on GitHub.

Running Amazon Instant Video on Android tablets

In September, Amazon finally released an official Instant Video app for Android. Unfortunately, this app is not downloadable on tablets via their app store — only phones. Yet, Amazon Instant video has been supported for years on Amazon’s own “Fire” Android-based tablets. It really bums me out that Amazon Instant Video continues to snub their competitors’ products, but if you’re like me and have a lot of purchases locked up in their store, there is a way:

I’d read in a couple places that if you install the APK manually, it works fine on tablets — as long as the phone version of Amazon’s store app is installed as well.

I used adb (apt-get install android-tools-adb) to transfer both apps from my Nexus 4 to my Nexus 7:

First, Enable USB debugging on both devices.

On the phone:

Find the app ids:

$ adb shell pm list packages | grep amazon
package:com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient
package:com.amazon.kindle
package:com.amazon.mShop.android

Locate the relevant APK files (your paths may vary):

$ adb shell pm path com.amazon.mShop.android
package:/data/app/com.amazon.mShop.android-1/base.apk

$ adb shell pm path com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient
package:/data/app/com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient-1/base.apk

Fetch the APKs (using the paths we got):

$ adb pull /data/app/com.amazon.mShop.android-1/base.apk mshop.apk
5364 KB/s (29897881 bytes in 5.442s)

$ adb pull /data/app/com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient-1/base.apk avod.apk
3134 KB/s (1960268 bytes in 0.610s)

On the tablet:

$ adb install mshop.apk
5139 KB/s (29897881 bytes in 5.681s)
    pkg: /data/local/tmp/mshop.apk
Success

$ adb install avod.apk
3166 KB/s (1960268 bytes in 0.604s)
    pkg: /data/local/tmp/avod.apk
Success

Now you should be able to launch Amazon Instant Video on your tablet, watch some Star Trek TNG, and dream of a world where tech companies don’t play silly games about which kind of PADD you use.