Multi-Touch Kit

A Do-It-Yourself Technique for Capacitive Multi-Touch Sensing Using a Commodity Microcontroller

Mutual capacitance-based multi-touch sensing is now a ubiquitous and high-fidelity input technology. However, due to the complexity of electrical and signal processing requirements, it remains very challenging to create interface prototypes with custom-designed multi-touch input surfaces. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Touch Kit, a technique enabling electronics novices to rapidly prototype customized capacitive multi-touch sensors. In contrast to existing techniques, it works with a commodity microcontroller and open-source software and does not require any specialized hardware. Evaluation results show that our approach enables multi-touch sensors that have a high spatial and temporal resolution, and can accurately detect multiple simultaneous touches. A set of application examples demonstrate the versatile uses of our approach for sensors of different scales, curvatures, and materials.

Open Source Toolkit

Multi-Touch Kit is available for download. We recommend you read the tutorial document first and then install the libraries.

Tutorial document (PDF)

Arduino Library (download on GitHub)

Processing Library (download on GitHub)

Selected Press

Publication

[Pdf]
[Publisher]