This touch-able add on shield for Arduinos will inspire your next interactive project with 12 capacitive touch sensors. Capacitive touch sensing works by detecting when a person (or animal) has touched one of the sensor electrodes. Capacitive touch sensing used for stuff like touch-reactive tablets and phones, as well as control panels for appliances, which is where you may have used it before. This shield allows you to create electronics that can react to human touch, with up to 12 individual sensors.
The shield has 12 ‘figure 8’ holes in it that can be gripped onto with alligator clip cables. Attach one side of the clip to the shield and the other side to something electrically conductive (like metal) or full of water (like vegetables or fruit!) Then start up our handy Arduino library to detect when the object is touched. That’s pretty much it, very easy! For advanced users, you can also solder to a pad to make a slimmer & more permanent connection. Works great with any Arduino as it only uses the I2C pins (SCL & SDA).
Each order comes with a Capacitive Touch Shield and a stick of 36-pin headers. You’ll need to do some light through-hole soldering to attach the headers onto the shield circuit board, but its easy to do with basic soldering tools like a soldering iron and rosin core electronics solder. You’ll also likely want to pick up a 12 pack of alligator clips!
Please note! This kit does not come with Arduino, alligator clips, or delicious fruit! However, we do have all of those in the store. Well, all except fruit – despite being called Adafruit, we do not actually sell fruit.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
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