Trill Gives Makers Easy Touch Sensing

Posted on 20/09/2019 by Paul Strauss

Makers, here’s a new set of gizmos for your bag of tricks. Created by open-source interactive sensor company Bela, the Trill series is a line of sensors which make it easy to add capacitive touch interactions to any DIY electronic project.

There are three devices in the Trill series, each designed for a different sort of touch project. The Trill Bar is a slider which can sense up to five touch points, the trackpad-like Trill Square senses two axes of movement, while the Trill Craft is a breakout board that lets you turn any conductive object into an interface. Yes, you can use it to play music with fruit and veggies if you want.

Each of the sensors has an on-board microcontroller and is capable of high-resolution sensing. The Trill Bar and Trill Square each have a resolution of less than 0.1 mm, and all three devices have just 5ms input latency for quick responsiveness.

All three devices are available for pre-order on Kickstarter now, with individual sensors selling for just £14 (~$18 USD) each. They also have discounted packs of 3, 5, and 30 sensors for larger projects or classroom usage. The crowdfunding campaign ends on 10/18/19.

Pizza Hut Reveals DJ Pizza Box: Eat to the Beat

Posted on 17/08/2016 by Conner Flynn

When DJs get hungry, they are now going to be turning to Pizza Hut. In a clever marketing gimmick, Pizza Hut UK has launched the “world’s first playable DJ pizza box”. Basically, a standard cardboard box rigged up with touch-sensitive decks, a mixer and other controllable buttons.

It was created by printed electronics expert Novalia. The battery-powered box connects to your computer or smartphone via Bluetooth and is compatible with a variety of DJ software. As shown in the videos below, you can scratch, rewind, control pitch and crossfade.

Pizza Hut will give a small number of them away and they will be limited to just five of Pizza Hut’s 350 UK restaurants, if you are a greasy fingered DJ. Now DJ’s can eat, then lay down the beat.

[via Engadget]

Halo Back iPhone 6/6 Plus Screen Protector Adds Invisible Back Button: Secret Exit

Posted on 21/05/2015 by Lambert Varias

In recent years, Apple has started following trends instead of popularizing them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what’s wrong is it’s done nothing to fix the weaknesses of the designs they’re adopting. For instance, like Samsung and other smartphone makers Apple hasn’t come up with a good way to make its large phones easier to use with one hand. Who would have thought that a screen protector could help with the problem? Yet that’s what the Halo Back does.

Halo Back’s contribution is small but could still be useful to a lot of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners. It has a transparent capacitive touch sensor at its lower left corner, just to the left of where the Home button is. That sensor is connected via a thin layer of circuitry to the upper left corner of the iPhone screen, i.e. where the virtual back button is often found in iOS apps. The result is an easy-to-access (and Android-like) back button.

Like other screen protectors, Halo Back does protect your screen from scratches. It appears to be a bit thicker than other screen protectors, though.

Pledge at least $14 (USD) on Kickstarter to receive a Halo Back screen protector as a reward. It’s not the ultimate fix for large smartphones – and what would be? Eye tracking? Slide-in sidebars? Moving all buttons to the bottom? – but I like it more than Apple’s Reachability.

[via TechnologyTell]

HP Sprout PC Has 3D Scanner, Projector and Touch Mat: Maker Seeds

Posted on 30/10/2014 by Lambert Varias

Smartphones and tablets have shown us that people love to interact with digital media in intuitive ways. Meanwhile, the rise of 3D printing and modeling are about to bring about a creative revolution the likes of which we’ve never seen before. HP wants to stay relevant in this future and generation by making… a huge Nintendo 3DS. Seriously though, the HP Sprout is an interesting vision for the PC of the future.

Along with its 23″ 1080p touch-sensitive monitor, the Sprout also comes with a 20″ capacitive touch mat. The mat is designed to be used in a variety of ways, most of them involving the Sprout’s several eyes up top. There’s a projector, a 14.6MP camera and 3D camera that can also scan 2D images. It still has USB ports and runs Windows 8.1, so I’m pretty sure you can still use it with a keyboard and mouse.

The idea is for Sprout to encourage the development of software that not only allows people to interact with the computer using intuitive gestures but to take physical objects and incorporate them in digital processes. As shown in the video above and in this much longer demo video, this can be anything from scanning objects and turning them into vector graphics, scanning books for quick editing and copying and of course scanning objects for 3D modeling or printing.

So again, it looks like a PC for the future, or at least the near future. Which is why I find it weird that HP is selling it right now, when the infrastructure isn’t here yet. Order a Sprout from HP starting at $1,900 (USD) if you’re that excited. Or if you’re a scanlator.

[via CNET]

Metaio Thermal Touch Uses Heat from Your Fingers to Turn Any Surface into a Touchscreen

Posted on 23/05/2014 by Lambert Varias

We’ve seen a couple of prototypes that enable or at least emulate touch-sensitivity on everyday objects. But as wearable technology continues to flourish, we’re going to need a simple and portable solution. Augmented reality company Metaio thinks they may have an answer with Thermal Touch, a technology that emulates touch-sensitivity using “the heat signature left by a person’s finger when touching a surface.”

Right now the hardware needed to pull off the feat is quite bulky. In the demo video below, Metaio used a tablet, a standard camera and a rather large infrared camera. The company hopes that in the future, all of the necessary hardware can be included in a wearable device similar to Google Glass, like so:

Here’s the demo video:

Sorry zombies, I guess you’ll be stuck with voice commands. Good luck with that.

[Metaio via TechCrunch]

DIY Plush USB Game Controller: Hug and Play

Posted on 21/04/2014 by Lambert Varias

We’ve seen all kinds of game controller plushies, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen one that can actually be used to play video games. Adafruit’s Becky Stern built the soft controller using their Flora Arduino-compatible platform and some conductive thread and fabric.

Even though Becky’s design looks like a squishy, oversize NES controller, your computer will recognize the plushie as a USB keyboard, so you can use it with any keyboard-based game. If you’re handy with stitching, perhaps you can modify Becky’s guide and make a plushie of your favorite controller. It would probably take a long time to build a full keyboard plushie though.

Make a plush browser and head to Adafruit for the full guide and parts list.

Ototo Musical Invention Kit Scales with Your Imagination

Posted on 05/02/2014 by Lambert Varias

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

Paper-Thin Keyboard: Print and Press

Posted on 05/02/2014 by Lambert Varias

The printed word is dying, but the printed keyboard is alive and kicking. And no, you won’t need a 3D printer to make one. A company called Novalia has made an incredibly thin Bluetooth keyboard made of photo paper, conductive ink and its proprietary electronic module.

Novalia made the keyboard to show off its advancements in printed technology, particularly the electronic module based on Nordic Semiconductor’s system-on-a-chip and a printing process that allows conventional printers to mass produce capacitive sensors.

Novalia’s technology could be used to make not just keyboards but other input devices as well, and existing printing presses could churn out hundreds of overlays with built-in sensors in a matter of minutes. Nordic Semiconductor says the module can last for up to nine months on a single CR2032 button cell battery.

I’m not sure if Novalia will make the keyboard available to the public. It does have Switchboard, a much simpler version of the keyboard on its online shop . That one’s made of foam board and has eight capacitive keys and sells for £25 (~$41 USD)

[via Geeky Gadgets & Nordic Semiconductor]

Cuttable Multi-touch Sensors: Cut, Paste, Tap, Swipe, Pinch

Posted on 24/01/2014 by Lambert Varias

Disney’s Touché concept can turn many ordinary objects into touch sensors. But what if you could buy materials such as wood, foil or paper that were already touch-sensitive off the shelf? That’s one of the dreams of a group called Embodied Interaction. To prove that the idea is applicable, the group made sheets of flexible and cuttable multi-touch sensors.

According to researchers Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Dr. Jürgen Steimle, their multi-touch sensor works even when parts of it are cut because of two main factors: how the electrodes – the points that sense touch – are wired to their connectors and where the connectors are located.

As the group claimed in their research paper (pdf), in conventional touch sensors electrodes are arranged in a flat grid and are wired to the connectors and to each other, as seen above. This presents two problems. First, several electrodes are dependent on one wire. Also, because the connectors are located at the edges of the sensor, you can’t damage or cut out those edges or you’ll leave the whole sheet useless. That won’t cut it for a cuttable sensor. In addition, conventional touch sensors are not made of materials that are hard to cut using ordinary tools.

What the research team did is to come up used circuit printing technology to make flexible multi-touch sensor sheets, in which the connectors are at the center of each sheet and the wires connect to as few electrodes as possible. In what they call the star topology, each electrode has its own wire to the connector. A second arrangement called the tree topology there are a few central wires that branch out and handle their own batch of electrodes.

The end result is a multi-touch sensor that can be cut into a variety of shapes, although obviously they couldn’t cut a hole in the middle of the sheet.

Of course, the challenge of wiring these touch-sensing sheets to a microcomputer is another matter altogether. Still, it would be nice if you could build your own touch-sensitive furniture, gadget or tools. Haed to Embodied Interaction’s website for more information on the concept.

[via PSFK]

Three Reasons Apple Should Outperform The Market In 2014

Posted on 31/12/2013 by forbes

Tim Cook gets paid more if Apple stock outperforms the S&P 500 index in 2014. His compensation is structured in a way that pays him more when his efforts reward shareholders. What’s not for...

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