Input Devices

This week’s assignment was to make a sensor and measure something.

Design

I designed a capacitive touch sensor. Using Eagle, I redesigned the hello.txrx.t1624 board, which uses an ATTINY1624 microcontroller; I also added an LED.

I then routed the paths in a similar fashion to the original board.

Milling

After designing my board, I milled it, along with the USB-D11C-serial and serial-UPDI-2 boards so I can connect and program my board with my computer, respectively.

Stuffing

I then stuffed my boards and made my capacitive touch sensor using copper tape.

Initially, I was unable to load the bootloader onto my USB-D11C-serial board, but that was because I was connecting it to the computer with the wrong pins. After getting some help with this, the bootloader was able to upload correctly. Note that I did not upload the regular bootloader, but rather a binary for having the chip behave as a USB to serial.

Programming

Finally, I programmed my board with the help of the sample coded provided for a capacitive touch sensor.

When testing my sensor, I put the bubble wrap between the two copper pads and an insulator on top.

The sensor can detect changes in voltage very well!