Benjamin Blundell has converted a Nintendo Power Glove run on modern systems as a USB joystick.

This totally rad project to breathe new life into 80’s technology. Benjamin has some affinity for some of the better parts of the 80’s , like- technology, style, and music.  This nostalgia for 80s tech lead him to take a look at the Nintendo Power Glove to see if he make it usable with modern technology rather than just the NES that it was designed for.

To start out, Ben gabbed a multimeter and mapped out the which of the BD9 connector pins correspond to which NES pins.  Luckily there is a lot of good information available on the NES controller protocol.  He then whipped up a converter board with a that the Power Glove plugs into to allow you to then use the Glove over USB.  The converter board uses the flight joystick capability of the Teensy-LC.  A level shifter was added because the Teensy-LC runs on 3.3v and the Glove on 5V. One of the nice things about this build is that it doesn’t requiring hacking the innards of the Power Glove itself.

Code for the project is published on GitHub.