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I have the following scenario: i am building a animatronic hand using some flex sensor, arduino board and 5 servo. No problem on this side. But i have the following idea: to build a 3D CAD model of the hand in Catia, or in any other CAD program, and in real time the virtual hand to copy the movements of the real hand in real time. I used something in Matlab when i did some plots in real time with some data from some sensor. It is posible to do that in a CAD program? To get the data from arduino and based on that data to simulate the movements of the virtual hand in real time. Can you tell if it posibile in wich program can i do the simulation?

Lucian

lusian_andrei
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This is absolutely possible with Catia as long as your can get your arduino data into the computer. Likely a lot of other CAD software packages too. Such as Solidworks, AutoCAD, UX, etc. They offer an API which would allow you to update the cad model from a script in "real-time" based on your animatronic hand. You could probably go both ways, CAD-drives-Hand and Hand-drives-CAD. The one issue I see happening with a CAD software is the real-time aspect. Depending on the how graphically intensive your CAD model is, there is a computational time overhead to re-draw/update the model position. So, if your hand is moving quickly with complex gestures and you have a complex 3D model, there might be some delay in the movements on screen.

Lastly, you might want to look at animation/cad/rendering software that has a more powerful native rendering engine, like Maya, or Rhino to accomplish this. (I would try Rhino first).

If you choose Catia, please ask a different question or update this one specifically regarding how to control a 3D model via the API and I could help to answer that also.

GisMofx
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