And this is my final concept for a project that I did at the TU/eindhoven. Again, triangles using WS2812B LEDs controlled by a Teensy 3.2. This setup includes Adafruit CAP1188 sensors in each panel that function as a proximity sensor. Still needs a lot of programming to make it more alive. Also, I have enough material to assemble 5 more panels, so more triangles will be added soon!
those are great!!
So can the capacitive sensor detect interaction at a distance? No need to touch but just get close?
Thats super cool, these would be great at parties!
@Justin_Eastman
Thats right. I used this document for some guidelines, and experimented with several antennas myself: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/AppNotes/en562765.pdf
I have been building “escape room” props for a local place and one of the props I built/am building is a door with three diffused glass windows. when the door is idle I use the noise function with the cloud palette to display wispy dreamy crap… when anyone touches the glass it goes into a Simon says mode and the viewer can play a three window Simon game on it. For a while I was testing the two pin Capsense library for capacitive sensing and then I moved over to the ADCTouch library to save pins. Ultimately because of the size of the touch sensor antennaes in this application (bright aluminum window screen on the back of each pane) I needed to constantly attenuate the sensitivity in the software. because I’m on a time constraint to deliver I cut all the sensor related code and adapted a 4 channel capacitive switch to the project. The switch adjusts sensitivity automatically so I don’t have to mess with it now.
But I guess the point of my writing this is to highlight the possibility of using the Capsense or ADCTouch lib’s to do this if you haven’t got a cap sensor handy. and yes, you can detect something as far as 2’ away. so both prox and cap sensing is possible.
My $.02… hope it can help someone…
Your .PDF has some very enlightening info in it. Thanks for posting that. I may be able to change my antennae to the open loop design they mention… That’'ll definitely cut down on the sensitivity and yet still afford full coverage of the touch surface. +1
@Jon_Bruno
Thank you for sharing your experiences. Personally, I really like the CAP-series of capacitive sensor chips as they handle a lot of filtering, automatically reset treshold capacitance values etc.
I have also been recommended to take a look at capacitance voltage division. Here you can find out more about this: http://admarschoonen.github.io/