Arduino Touch in the wild..

It is always nice to see stuff you have been involved in pop up in the wild.

A couple of years ago I developed a method for swept frequency capacitance analysis for Arduino. The system was inspired by Disney Research Touché which uses a somewhat more advanced hardware.  My colleague Mads Høbye  challenged me to make a version that would be simple to implement on Arduino. Mads then added gesture analysis functionality (for processing) and  made a Instructable describing how to build and use the system.

Over the years I have been delighted to see a few applications of the system by others as well as some further developments. To mention a few:

Vanessa Carpenter Electronic Kintsugi. (other blog ref.)

David Mellis Usage examples

Philipp Schmitt Usage

Tore Knudsen (et al) Pour reception

Nick Arner Talking to plants

Studio NAND has made a Arduino library which features some of my original code and circuit.

First experiments before implementing on Arduino:

The effect shown in the video is something I had noticed earlier when working with Tesla Coils. The resonance frequency of a coil/electrode system is greatly affected by nearby people and objects.

Originally it was thought that the frequencies needed for the analysis could not be generated by the humble Arduino. While working with some other projects I realized that they indeed could.

At the end og the day it is very motivating to make something that gives a broad range of users access to new inventions.

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