HTMAAA Week 8 / Input Devices

This week was alot of getting used to the flow of the PCB making process, as well as fiddling with different PCB machines.

Turns out that the Carvera PCB milling machine would really shut down on me, and I tried to fix it by myself, which I really shouldn’t have done. It ended up beign a lot of work and having to get new firmware for the machine, but hopefully now, we have a backup of the firmware.

My goals this week were to use the capactive sensors so that I could touch a certain place and trigger some kind of action. Therefore, I decided on making a capactive touch sensor board that would look like a gamepad.

The final product looked like this

I originally started testing with a normal copper metal touchpad at first, using some of the copper cutables that would be avaliable for the cutting machine. After I got the initial idea of it working, I saw some articles online, mainly some instructables https://www.instructables.com/ArduinoESP32-Capacitive-Touch-Sensor/ of how to make a capacitive touch sensor, and I decided to try and make one of those.

For a initial prototype it was good, and I was ready to move to a PCB, and I also noticed that some of the people who made it before also recommended to use a resistor to make it so that the capactive would only go off if I was to touch the gamepad, rather than just around the board.

I was also going to want to just strip all the non copper parts away from the board, which I thought I could do by making a zone mask of a ground plane or something in kicad, but Alfonso stepped in to show me that this could be done by changing some of the values in the MODS file, mainly the offset number and changing it to be 0.

but some complications occurred with the PCB machines, so I decided to make another rough prototype with the vinyl cuttter downstairs.

However, I was having some issues with the copper being too hard to cut, and I really should have tweaked with the settings, but I decided against it and went back to PCB making.

As always the file for the PCB can be found here