Brian's HTMAA Diary 2024

Week 07: Input Devices

Group Assignment

We're back in the CBA electronics lab with Erik for a tutorial on input devices.

Erik showed us a prototype for a device for sensing motion in a car seat using a magnet sensor.

We then looked at the different way signals look on the oscilloscope versus the digital logic analyzer.

Jessica brought her week's assignment so we also checked it on the digital logic analyzer to see if we would get any input.

Individual Assignment

For my individual assignment, I wanted to try implementing capacitive touch with the copper pcb boards as objects.

I used the built-in capactive touch pins available on the ESP32 boards and code using step response.

While the code works well with the prototype, I needed it to work on wires that were 12 feet long for an installation I wanted to implement capactive touch on. Viewers can touch the copper pieces and cause the body to convulse.

The capactive touch didn't work as I expected when I increased the wire length, So I had hardcode a variable as the starting value. It works intermittenly, but I will be trying to fix whatever issue is going on.