Introduction

While I was working at Thalmic Labs I worked with the Myo and helped develop various applications.

The Myo is an armband that can detect muscle activation and movements of the user’s arm.

During one of the company’s hackathons I built a quick wrapper program to pass the Myo hand poses to an Arduino. After the hackathon I cleaned it up a bit and posted it in the marketplace for Myo applications.

I got quite a few people reaching out to me about the application and was surprised by how many people were using it. Some people were just playing with it but many other were using it for research purposes (a few Master’s thesis for example).

Myo used with prosthetic arm. Screenshot from Thalmic Labs

In the end the Myo didn’t turn into a huge commercial success, but it did get a bunch of cool maker applications and had a decent community around it.

Fast forward a bit, after I left Thalmic Labs, to October 2018 and Thalmic Labs decided to re-brand. Thalmic turned into “North” and announced their Focals product (which I also worked on while I was there). However right before this Thalmic Labs announced the discontinuation of the Myo (link), while not a surprise how it was handled was a little odd. When the rebrand went live the Myo Market and some developer resources went down.

Since the app (MyoDuino) I built had quite a few people using it I felt bad that anyone who had a Myo was left without some of the resources they need. While some resources are still available here: https://support.getmyo.com/hc/en-us (as of November 2018) I have added a Myo section to my website with all the pieces someone would need to use a Myo as well as my application.

I have also pulled a blog article that was written about the MyoDuino app as a getting started guide. This article can still be found on North’s website but only by directly navigating to it, so I thought it was worth backing up on my site.