Replicating the fancy touch sensor that uses anything

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Sprite_tm], a name many of you will recognize from these pages, has wasted no time in replicating the latest cool thing in a much simpler fashion. En Garde is a touch sensor that can detect up to 32 different points of contact on… whatever you use as the surface.  He couldn’t sit idly by and let the Disney funded one from yesterday keep the spot light. As you can see in the video, it works pretty well. If he didn’t tell you that his can only detect up to 32 points as opposed to the 200 of the other, you probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.  Of course, [Sprite_tm] also shares how you could easily beef his up to be even more precise. You can also download his source code an schematics from his site and give it a try yourself.

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Filed Under: classic hacks, multitouch hacks Tagged With: , ,

Reaching out to a touch screen with a microcontroller

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We love capacitive touch screens. They’re much more robust than resistive touch screens and if the UI is programmed well they produce a great user experience. But getting your electronics project to interact with one is a bit tough. [RobB] has been experimenting in that area, and managed to build a simple touchscreen actuator for microcontroller use.

In the video after the break you can see his proof of concept. He’s using an Arduino to enter the number 2 on an Android  iOS calculator app once every second. It doesn’t take much to pull off this trick, [RopB] just taped a piece of tin foil to the screen and connected it to the Arduino with a jumper wire. The pin is left floating until a screen tap is needed, at which point it is pulled to ground.

A custom app operating at slow speeds could use this as an input technique. Two pieces of foil (one acting as clock, the other data) would provide a rudimentary serial transfer system.

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Filed Under: multitouch hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Touch-based wirless RGB lamp control

February 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Alex] built an add-on board for his TI launchpad that lets him use it as a wireless controller for an RGB lamp (translated). As you can see above, the board has a pair of female pin-headers which make it easy to install or remove the board. This way you can use it for other projects without any hassle.

The board itself doesn’t have any buttons. Instead, [Alex] etched a two-sided PCB, including pads for use as capacitive touch sensors. Here we only see the underside of the board, which hosts four RGB LED modules. These give feedback by showing the levels which are about to be set for each color. In the clip after the break you’ll get a good look at the touch sensors. There are two that act like buttons, scrolling through each color channel, and sending the updated values to the lamp via a wireless module mounted on that same side. There are also four pads which act as a slider. We didn’t see any code but apparently this uses one of TI’s touch sensor libraries.

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Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , , , , , ,