Making a responsive capacitive touch pad set with Raspberry Pi Pico #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi
James Brown on Mastodon demonstrates making an array of capacitive touch pads on a circuit board. On reading the pads, the typical algorithm of polling was reversed:
The capacitive sensor works by discharging the pad through a resistor and timing how long it takes. Previously I was doing this a few thousand times in a loop and returning the accumulated time. Here I’m doing it the other way round – spending a fixed time in the loop, and counting how many charge / discharge cycles it can do. My aim was to make it easier to tune the sample period, but it turns out noticeably smoother and less noisy this way too.
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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.
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