Kitronyx Single Chip Force & Touch Solution

Kitronyx Single Chip Force & Touch Solution

Kit:
Placa Snowboard
Adaptador MS9723C01
MS9723
MS9724

Overview
Arduino Leonardo
The SNOWBOARD is an Arduino Leonardo compatible board with an integrated force and capacitive touch sensing controllers.

The SNOWBOARD has been designed to be an Arduino compatible prototyping platform for anyone to build natural user interface devices, especially those requiring force/pressure and capacitive touch sensing.

In SNOWBOARD, Arduino Leonardo and two dedicated sensing ICs are embedded - one for multi-force sensing and the other for capacitive touch sensing. Therefore, you can use popular and easy Arduino IDE to develop your own force and touch sensing projects. Very naturally, SNOWBOARD is compatible with most Arduino shields. The beauty of using Arduino Leonardo is that SNOWBOARD can be immediately turned into a mouse or a keyboard which are essential feature to make a user interface device.

Force and Pressure
Snowboard's multi-force sensing is based on the cutting-edge mutual resistive sensing (a.k.a resistive tactile sensing) which is a resistive version of modern capacitive multi-touch sensing technology. You can use a popular single zone FSR sensors as well as a multi-touch matrix sensor. The latter is very useful to build a pressure mapping system or a force-based touch or multi-touch interface. The force sensing IC of SNOWBOARD has been solely developed by Kitronyx and can be connected to any resistive matrix sensor. We developed two different matrix sensors for Snowboard - a 10x7 matrix sensor with wide dynamic range and a 16x10 matrix sensor with low force detection. Of course, conventional force sensors such as FSR pressure sensor can be used with SNOWBOARD via its onboard ports that are compatible with Arduino Leonardo.

Capacitive Touch
And Snowboard has an onboard capacitive touch sensing ICs that supports 12 sensing electrodes. When a conductive object such as a human hand is in close proximity to the sensor, the sensor detects and outputs capacitance change. You can make your own custom sensor using any conductive material. For example, you can implement your own touch switch, wheel, slider, and so forth.

There are onboard I2C interface port as well. Most sensors support I2C interface to communicate with microcontrollers. So this onboard I2C interface port is very convenient to connect an external sensor to SNOWBOARD without hassle.

General
- Arduino Leonardo compatible - It's just an Arduino Leonardo. Arduino IDE recognizes Snowboard as an Arduino Leonardo. You can easily use tons of Arduino software and shield hardware.
- Onboard force controller - This controller supports upto 10x16 matrix sensors
- True touch: no ghost touches
- Microprocessor: Atmel ATMega32U4
- Operating voltage: 5V
- Power Consumption: 7mA / 2461mAh
- 20 digital I/O pins
- 7 PWM channels
- 12 analog input channels
- 32KB of flash memory of which 4KB used by boot loader
- 2.5KB of SRAM and 1KB of EEPROM
- 16MHz clock speed
- Communication - Micro B USB cable (not included)
- Size: 94.1mm x 75.05mm

Extended Features (Force Sensing)
- Embedded force pressure distribution sensing IC - mutual resistive sensing with 10x7 and 16x10 channels and 256 (8 bit) pressure sensing levels (sensor is not included)
- 50Hz (20ms) frame rate for force sensing - 120us to read a single force node
- Embedded analog capacitive touch sensing IC - self capacitance sensing with 12 channels
- Onboard I2C interface port for easy connection with external sensors