Adafruit
Standalone 5-Pad Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout - AT42QT1070
This breakout board is the simplest way to create a project with mutiple capacitive touch sensors. No microcontroller is required here - just power with 1.8 ...
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This breakout board is the simplest way to create a project with mutiple capacitive touch sensors. No microcontroller is required here - just power with 1.8 to 5.5VDC and connect up to 5 conductive pads to the 5 left-hand pins. When a capacitive load is detected (e.g. a person touches one of the conductive contacts) the corresponding LED on the right lights up and the output pin goes low. You can use this to update an existing normal-button project where buttons connect to ground when pressed.
Note that only one contact will be detected at once (this is to protect against having a hand brush against two or more contacts at once.
Comes with a fully assembled board, and a stick of 0.1" header so you can plug it into a breadboard. For contacts, we suggest using copper foil, then solder a wire that connects from the foil pad to the breakout.
The datasheet has many details on sensitivity, power usage, etc. - note that this board uses the chip in 'standalone' mode only, it cannot be used in I2C mode.
Jargon buster
Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.
- breakout
- A breakout board carries a small or fine-pitched component and brings its connections out to standard, breadboard- and header-friendly pins. Describing a part as a breakout means it can be wired into a project without soldering directly to the component's tiny contacts.
- I2C
- I2C is a two-wire communication bus used by many sensors and small modules. It matters because several I2C devices can share the same two wires, but each device needs a compatible address and your controller must support I2C.
- LED
- A light-emitting diode (LED) is a small electronic component that emits light when current flows through it in the correct direction. Because it only conducts one way, its polarity matters, and a through-hole LED must be soldered the correct way around to light up.
- microcontroller
- A microcontroller is a small computer on a single chip that runs a stored program and controls connected inputs and outputs such as buttons, sensors, displays and communication interfaces. In a device built around one, it is the part that executes the code and coordinates the device's behaviour.
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