Arduino Log 9: Touch Sensor

I wanted to do this touch sensor because of the abundance of touch screens in everyday life nowadays. Capacitive touch sensors are practically applied in every part of consumer electronics ranging from smartphones like the iPhone to whole table sized interfaces such as the original Microsoft Surface. The touch sensor on the Arduino is based on the same principle where to sense something, the sensor has to some into contact with something dielectric (excluding air).

I had all of the components available in the green ARDX kit from Seeedstudio. The circuit was fairly simple to set up with the instructions online. I simply followed the directions and uploaded the code to the Arduino making sure that I set it up with the correct serial port to prevent any errors such as those that I encountered before when I used the wrong port.

This was a very cool experiment and slightly nostalgic to me as I remembered making a plant hydration sensor a few years ago at my old school which was very similar to this but designed to use water as the conductor instead of body capacitance.