- Medtex Touch Sensor - Media Computing Group

Wearable Computing Tutorials - Touch Sensor

This is a simple touch sensor for e-textiles. The center of the sensor is connected to GND of a microcontroller. The surrounding pieces are connected to inputs of the same microcontroller. When your finger touches the center and a surrounding pice, the microcontroller can tell where you touched the sensor.

Downloads

Materials

Conductive fabric

Non-conductive base

Copper tape

Tools

Lasercutter

Usage

Instructions

I used the lasercutter to cut the medtex180 conductive fabric (sparkfun DEV-10055). I started with speed 100% and power 15% and then I added nuts to the fabric and cut the material again with 100% speed and 50% power... here you can see the results:

Then I added the pieces to another (non-conductive) sheet of fabric and used copper tape (sparkfun PRT-10561) to fix it before sewing it:

Then I sewed the fabrics together and soldered wires to the copper tape (from the back)

front:

back:

The next revision has the center like a tree instead of a circle. And sewing is much nicer - the first was just a quick prototype!

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