#capacitive touch sensor

Finally got the 10M ohm resistors in. Here's the capacitive touch sensor in testing.

Yesterday was a very exciting day here at Rapid Keypads!  When designing keypads, you must design mechanical features as well as electrical features.  Since most electrical / pcb cad software is great for circuit design they are usually lacking when it comes to mechanical design / dimensioning.  This is why I do the keypad design in both mechanical cad, Solidworks as well as my pcb schematic / layout cad software.

The greatest thing the electrical cad software does is it has design rules that keep traces a certain distance apart.  This helps tremendously when you are routing a difficult keypad circuit.  Since capacitive touch keypads are very sensitive when it comes to the layout it is very helpful to have the computer software keeping traces the correct distance apart.  Also, it can help keep traces the same length if needed.

Once I do the mechanical design and combine my electrical circuit layout, I end up with a .dxf file.  This .dxf file is great because it is a standard mechanical (autocad) file which should just import into our graphic program.  Every graphic program has a .dxf file import... and sometimes they work... but most of the time they do not!  DXF files come in several versions / flavors...  I drop my version down to a very low autocad version which strips all of the fancy features the later versions of autocad / dxf files have.  This tends to help the import... but in my case, still did not solve the problem. 

The lines (circuit layout) kept coming into these graphic programs as rectangles with little circles (nodes) attaching one rectangle to the next.  What a mess!  What I needed was stroke lines!  NOT RECTANGLES!!!  Finally...  I figured out what to do...  I no longer have to re-draw the design in the graphic software, and make several more file conversions...  I am finally able to take my designs and get them to digitally print in less than half the time it used to take me!    This has easily shaved 3-4 hours off of the design time! 

I know you are dying to know what I actually did to solve this huge problem... Well... It is a trade secret! ;-)  If I told you, I would have to.... well you know! 

Yesterday was the first time we digitally printed a capacitive touch pad.  Similar to what you find on a laptop computer...  Our capacitive touch pad sensor can be digitally printed, then plugged into our Fast Touch electronics.  Then you simply plug the fast touch electronics into the USB port on your computer, and you have a touch pad! This touch pad has great resolution and can be used under a piece of glass or acrylic.  The applications for this capacitive touch technology are endless. 

From start to finish, this took me a little more than a half of a day!  We are very excited about this!  The old fashioned way of making this touch pad would have taken several weeks to months to make.