This week I aimed to test a possible sensor method for my final project. Since I need a grid of sensors that can detect distance to a hand in space. From the Input lecture, I thought the best method would be capactive sensing. I went to see Anthony for advice and he guided me towards the ESP32-S3 for its built in sensing capabilities.

I designed my board in fusion with 8 pads for capacitive sensing and the microcontroller with an extra pad for ground between the two rows of pads.

It took a few tries to mill my board due to different failure methods on the arch shop Roland mill. I think the issues had to do with bed adhesion - the copper bed might need to be replaced. But with my board finally milled, I soldered on the microcontroller and went to go test.

I plugged the board into my computer and had chatgpt assist me in writing code to put into the Arduino software to help read the sensors. I prompted chatgpt with the pins I needed to address and pushed the code it generated to my board.

I opened the serial plotter and waved my hand closely to the board and was able to register spikes in the chart! This will definitely need iteration and calibration if I want to use this method for my final project but this was a successful proof of concept.