

Add Gestures and Touch to your Arduino - emranemran
http://www.justhover.com/

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emranemran
We created this dev-kit to let Arduino projects work with gestures + touch. It
came out of the need for a project which required basic hand gestures to work
accurately. We tested with proximity and distance-IR sensors but wasn't
satisfied with the accuracy and development time required to make it work. We
decided to build a dev-kit that uses e-field distortion to detect gestures
accurately. We just launched it hoping it might help other hardware hackers
looking to add gestures/touch to their projects.

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TheCowboy
Any chance you'll release how you built this?

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brightghost
looks like its basically just the reference implementation of the MGC3130
chip, with an arduino library for i2c communication.

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trevyn
Uses the MGC3130:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclJ1mOFZZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclJ1mOFZZg)

[http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001667C.pd...](http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/40001667C.pdf)

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brightghost
Anyone from the project here care to elaborate on the niceties of this
dedicated chip? I'm currently putting finishing touches on a project with a
swipe-based (touch, not hover) interface built around the (surely rough-and-
dirty, but surprisingly capable) CapacitiveSensor Arduino library.

I'm sure the timing issues one sidesteps by using a dedicated controller ic
are critical for projects more complicated than mine, but I'm curious if you
know more about the limitations of trying to implement something similar
onboard with the AVR. Is there something fundamentally different in the
sensing method here compared to low-threshold capacitive sensing?

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emranemran
One of the project owners here. I've used the capsense arduino library a long
time ago and it's decent when you don't need the accuracy. I found that the
sensor values were affected by the environment quite a bit e.x. I'd have to
recalibrate everything if the project was being used in a room with a carpet
which affected the body charge. Maybe you found a way around it?

Re: the sensing method, they're similar in the sense that both the avr and
mgc3130 detects a change in capacitance to figure out the position. But the
mgc3130 controller can detect capacitance changes in the femtofarad range.

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taylorbuley
Uses GPIO: So not just Arduinos!

I know this mentions it in the description, but I think it could be made more
clear. Sincerely, _Order #0039_

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emranemran
Thanks for the support and you're correct! We're working on getting rpi
integration as well.

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iqster
Neat. How does the hovering work? Is that also using capacitive sensing?

~~~
emranemran
The capacitive electrodes form an electric field around the surface of the
pcb. When your hand or finger (conductive surface) is in range, the chip
senses the distortion of the e-field (change in capacitance) to track your
hand movement and calculate the position.

