Here’s an entry in the Open 7400 Logic competition: Capacitive Sensing, the Hard Way – 16 Channel Capacitive Sensor, RS232 Out
Leave a comment
Here’s an entry in the Open 7400 Logic competition: Capacitive Sensing, the Hard Way – 16 Channel Capacitive Sensor, RS232 Out
Really cool and clean project – and very well documented!
You are God! Were you bored with your life to take such a project up? :-P Awesome!
No, I wasn’t bored at all. I was already experimenting with capacitive sensing when the contest came on. Just went a bit into over-engineering mode. Took effectively only few days to design; a bit more to build, though. Actually, I think most time went into documenting.
Stunning mixed signal design, good write-up and retro RS232 serial port too! Not taking the easy way out with a logic level USB uart. A prizewinner in my eyes!
Very good :) The best one so far, IMHO.
I’m to compete too, but my chips have not arrived yet. Expect some competition on this, I’m also focused on capacitive properties … :) and in a tutorial-style design.
Your documentation is very very good. A great work!.
Thanks for posting your insite into capacitive touch. Really interested. I am convinced that Apple has a patent impeding hover based touch interaction from satisfying a huge demand; it would be nice for the diyers to get an early chance to play with it.
OK newbies’s you remind me of my not to early days as a EE at NASA. I would hand draft 7400 logic schematic for interfaces to mini- computers on a drafting table. Then I would wire wrap the design using a Gardner-Denver wire wrap tool with # 30 gauge wire. As serial to parallel interfaces for the TRS80 could cost $100 or more, so I built my own. I used 2 74LS96 shift registers and some start and stop logic to drive a ASR 35 teletype to print out my program listing. The TRS80 had a 44 pin bus connector on the side
I had some address decode logic to parallel load the 8 bit data into the pair of 74LS96 registers
I wish I were knowledgeable enough to join the contest! I have just started again in electronics which I have left behind 15 years ago as a hobby. //cry
Do not despair, you do not need to be versed in all aspects to compete. The simplest of ideas are often the funniest.
Then, you should know that I also need to do a deal of reading up on the chips at hand to get a design to play the way I want…
Hey Guys – I know this was over 4 years ago, but it looks like the 7400contest.com domain expired. Do you have a repository of this stuff somewhere else accessible?
thanks!