Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Arduino Capacitive Touch Sensor - How to control the world with your fingertips and an Arduino board only

We still looking in easy and affordable ways to communicate with Arduino through our bio-metric signals without having to use very expensive gadgets.

During the previous days we figured out some projects that try to read human signals (such as Galvanic Skin Response).

Today we are going to study a new project that uses human body capacitance to control Arduino projects.

In this project you’ll learn how you can control stuff connected to Arduino only by touch of your fingertips.

This is called capacitive touch sensing. You don’t need special tools or hardware. Instead, you use Arduino as a measurement tool to sense your body’s capacitance to inform Arduino board of that touch.

In this form, you can using touch as any normal control you know. This can replace a toggle stich, a push button or a slider.

You can use your imagination to control different stuff from your environment.

From my own personal experience, I’ve been noticing strange activity when interacting with microcontroller like Microchip PIC with touch. I noticed that the circuit responds to that touch. I knew then that response was a response to capacitance.

I actually thought of using touch as a means to control microcontroller. I’ve tried to make it by reading input from the microcontroller pin many times.

Although I’ve been somehow close to the right way of doing so, but I didn’t accurately read the state of touch to differentiate it from the non-touching state.

Later I found a project that implemented the idea using Microchip PIC. And today we have many projects using the Arduino capacitive touch library to make creative stuff. My dream has become true. I’m really happy about it. Even I didn’t do it myself, but my idea was correct.

And due to the fact that this circuit doesn’t require any hardware (only the Arduino board and some wires) it makes it a perfect Arduino project for me.

As you all know, I love projects that’s made of Arduino and Arduino only.

In Arduino website you can find the capacitive touch sensor library. You need to add it to your Arduino IDE and then use it in your sketches.

Source: Arduino Website , instructables