Oak Development Technologies' Acorn Gives Arduino, Python Access to a Seven-Channel Touch Sensor

Oak Development Technologies has launched a breakout board, dubbed the Acorn, designed to add "a touch of fun" to projects: It offers easy access to the Microchip AT42QT1070 capacitive touch sensor.

"We're pretty touched by this acorn," hardware developer Seth Kerr claims of its latest board design. "A powerful and versatile capacitive touch sensor by Microchip that provides seven channels of touch input on a single chip with a large variety of configuration which make it ideal for all kinds of touch projects."

The compact board is includes the AT42QT1070 sensor chip, two QWIIC/STEMMA QT compatible I2C connectors, and unpopulated pin headers for each of the sensor's seven capacitive touch-sensing channels, power, and I2C.

"I made this because I thought it would be a fun way to bring a really well featured capacitive touch IC to an easy to use form factor," Kerr explains. "We've helped take the development guesswork out of your hands by providing two easy to use libraries in Python and Arduino!"

The design is open source, with Kerr making the design files available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license for anyone to use — modified or otherwise. The source code for the Arduino and Python libraries are similarly made available under the MIT license.

Oak Dev Tech is selling the Acorn through its Tindie store, priced at $12.95.