Touch / Hover - Arbitary Double-coated Fabrics

What does the sensor do?

It can be used to augment arbitary textiles with touch and hover sensing capabilities.

How it works?

Double-coated textiles are also capable of capacitive-based sensing, including touch and proximity sensing. Self-capacitance is used in our research to realize capacitive sensing. When voltage is applied to conductive fabrics, the fabrics and the earth's surface can be viewed as a parallel-plate capacitor, generating an electric field around it. If body parts are brought close to conductive fabrics, this electric field and the capacitance of conductive fabrics will be changed, which can be detected as proximity or touch events. The advantage of using double-coated textiles instead of off-the-shelf conductive fabrics is that arbitrary textiles can be transformed into a touch-sensitive interface, retaining their original structures and hand feel. We will demonstrate this advantage later in the application section.

You will need:

• carbon black ink and polyurethane
• arbitary fabrics
• conductive silver fabric

Sensor structure & Fabrication steps

• Laser cut fabrics.
• Dip-coat / partially-dip-coat / brush-coat the Velcro with carbon black ink and then polyurethane.
• Connect with silver fabric segments. Double-coated fabrics only need to be connected to one I/O port of the Arduino using the silver fabric.

Coding and wiring connection details can refer to capsense library of Arduino