Touch controls have been sine qua non in the consumer market without much sign of them populating industrial applications. Well, until now.
UK-based Abacus has just introduced a new board that allows any PC to be used to evaluate and design a flexible touch control interface. The equally appealing feature this board is its price. Just £89, and an eye catcher for the engineering fraternity.
Apple’s iPOD and other consumer electronics applications, have been obvious users of touch controls appealing to the nimble fingered youth of today and a few oldies too. Now they have become increasingly attractive to designers of professional and industrial instruments for use in the HMI. No moving parts is an advantage and touch controls are by definition fully sealed, making them easy to integrate into a front panel design which becomes attractive rather than functional. And that matters even in industrial applications.
Abacus's engineering team has based its board on the Analog Devices AD7147 CapTouch™ controller, and allows designers to develop responsive touch controls including scroll wheels, sliders, touch pads and/or up to 36 individual touch sensitive buttons. It uses capacitance-to-digital conversion which makes it pretty neat for portable applications, and can be implemented in an ultra thin form factor.
There is some downloadable software which allows designers to test the capacitance sensors, and experiment with different register settings to obtain the optimum performance in their system environment.
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