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Fab Academy 2014

Input Devices

This week I decided to create another sensor based daughter board and try to take my Embedded Programming assignment a step further. I've been considering and reconsidering my final project, and one idea that keeps coming back is a touchpad with capacitve sensors hidden beneath a thin wooden veneer (which could be laser cut). This could maintain a nice aesthetic, and easily be integrated into any one of the projects I'm considering. So, for this week, in addition to working with my Hall Effect sensor, I decided to create a step response sensor using Neil's hellow world option. This turned out to be more challenging than I had expected. For updates on the Hall Effect sensor including an important reminder about checking to make sure you're not reading a floating pin, see Embedded Programming.

Since I ended up going down a few rabbit holes with the step response sensor, I actually wrote my documentation as quick notes in class. This is actually a much better way of doing things, and hopefully I can continue this going forward. Here was my blow by blow account:

VIDEO of touch sensor


click for full size

click for full size

NOTE FOR NEXT TIME: Shawn advised that I look into the QTouch sensors for multiple button input. These support up to 8 buttons and communicate sort of like a serial connection which would save a lot of pins. Their also developed by ATMEL, so they should integrate nicely with the ATTiny.