Rodney Trusty's Capacitive Touch Sensors, Made From Cotton and Conductive Thread, Target Wearables
Supplied with a simple Arduino sketch demonstrating their use, these fabric pads are aimed at smart clothing projects.
Electronics enthusiast Rodney Trusty has put together a series of simple capacitive touch sensors built with wearables and smart fabrics in mind — using entirely fabric-based components.
"[These are] textile capacitive touch sensors made from cotton and conductive thread," Trusty writes of his compact 40×70mm (around 1.6×2.8") sensors. "I made these to allow simple integration of touch sensing in textile applications."
Built with smart clothing and furniture in mind, the sensors are surprisingly simple — and entirely flexible. The fabric pads work just like a momentary switch: press your finger to the "button" to activate, and release to deactivate.
The fabric sensors work via capacitance, relying on code watching for when the detected capacitance passes a defined threshold. The difference in capacitance between dry air and the human finger is what triggers the input, rather than the closing of a circuit as with a traditional switch.
Trusty has made the sensors available to buy on the WizardTech Tindie store at $8 before volume discounts, with a simple Arduino sketch demonstration available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.