Thursday, January 5, 2012

Grounding the humans

While troubleshooting some capacitive touch issues today, I discovered a major advancement.  By grounding the human who will be touching the buttons, it makes detecting capacitive touches very much easier as there is a path to ground through the skin.  Looks like I'll be needing to procure some conductive fabric to play with.  As a test, I've just got some bare wires running over the hand support this evening and it is working great.  I read over Jeff's write up over at Keyglove regarding conductive cloth.  I'll need to find a source to get a little.  It doesn't have to be all that stretchy as I'll be sewing it to a piece of velcro.  The end-user will need to just paste it on the hand support somewhere it that it will contact their hand.  The hand support will be made from material with velcro loop, so options are limitless.

2 comments:

  1. I'll mail you a small piece of the stuff I have if you'd like. I bought a 1'x3' cut a year ago, and I still have most of it. I think you have my email, so just let me know if/where to send it.

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  2. I put in an order for the MedTex180 from Spark Fun to see how it goes. If that doesn't seem like it will be a good fit, I may well contact you to check out what you have. Thanks!

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