Getting touchy performance with your screen’s touch screen? Resistive touch screens are incredibly popular as overlays to TFT and LCD displays. Only problem is they require a bunch of analog pins and you have to keep polling them since the overlays themselves are basically just big potentiometers. If your microcontroller doesn’t have analog inputs, or maybe you want just a way more elegant controller, the TSC2007 is a nice way to solve that problem.
This breakout board features the TSC2007, which has an easy-to-use I2C interface available. There is also an interrupt pin that you can use to indicate when a touch has been detected to your microcontroller or microcomputer. We wrapped up the chip with a 3V voltage regulator and level shifting so it’s safe to use with 3V or 5V logic. It’s a nicely designed chip, and has very stable precise readings. We found it’s also a lot faster than trying to do all the readings on an Arduino.
For the screens that have 1mm pitch FPC cables, you can plug the cable right into the connector. The majority of medium/large touchscreens have that kind of connector. If you have another kind of touch screen, the four X/Y contacts are available on 0.1″ pitch breakouts so you can hand-solder or wire them.
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.
