Texas Instruments announced a new software library, sensor tuning GUI, design collateral and support for additional microcontrollers (MCU) to ease development of capacitive touch solutions. With low-power operation at less than 1 μA average current per button, MSP430 MCUs are well suited for capacitive touch button, slider, wheel and proximity applications, including portable electronics, household appliances and accessories.
TI’s open source MSP430 Capacitive Touch Software Library now allows developers to use the recently announced MSP430G2xx5 Value Line devices and Wolverine MSP430FR58xx/FR59xx devices for button, slider, wheel and proximity capacitive touch applications. These new devices provide engineers with more options for cost-conscious and low-power applications with capacitive touch.
The MSP430 Capacitive Touch Pro graphical user interface (GUI) is a new PC-based tool that enables designers to evaluate, diagnose and tune capacitive touch button, slider and wheel designs in real-time. This tool charts raw capacitive data from up to 10 sensors so developers can visually pinpoint and perform factor analysis easier, resulting in faster debugging, testing and time-to-market. It features user-configurable ranging, recording and printing options.
Power consumption for a capacitive touch system can be estimated before implementing hardware with TI’s MSP430 Capacitive Touch Power Designer GUI and application note. This GUI simulates the estimated average current draw for capacitive touch systems using select MSP430 MCUs, while users adjust system parameters such as operating voltage, frequency, and number of button and gate times.
TI’s capacitive touch experts have also created several comprehensive design guides to help developers learn sensor design techniques, reduce power consumption and improve response times for button, slider and wheel designs.
In addition, MSP430 MCUs support capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheel functionalities on TI’s haptic technology evaluation kits. The DRV2605 haptic driver evaluation module is a complete demo and evaluation platform that provides tactile feedback through touch-based interfaces.
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