Microchip Technology Offers Capacitive Touch Demo Board

9th September 2008

ES Admin

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Microchip has announced the PICDEM Touch Sense 2 Demo Board for capacitive touch-sensing applications. The easy-to-use board comes with the royalty-free mTouch Sensing Solution Software Development Kit (SDK) and is populated with a 16-bit PIC24FJ256GB110 microcontroller (MCU), which features an integrated Charge Time Measurement Unit (CTMU) peripheral for fast capacitive touch sensing. This is also the world’s first 16-bit MCU family with USB On-The-Go (OTG).

The board and supporting materials provide a complete platform for implementing capacitive touch-sensing interfaces, without the need for external components. Additionally, with the PIC24FJ256GB110 family’s rich peripheral integration and 256 Kbytes of Flash memory, and Microchip’s broad portfolio of free and low-cost software libraries, embedded designers can use a single MCU to cost effectively implement a wide variety of additional user-interface functions, including QVGA touch-screen displays, speech-based audio prompts and USB connectivity.

Many applications in the consumer, appliance, medical, industrial and automotive markets are rapidly adopting capacitive touch-sensing technology for reasons of aesthetics, maintenance, cost and cleanliness. Expanding on Microchip’s existing 8-bit PIC® microcontroller-based mTouch development tools for capacitive touch, and equipped with capacitive touch-sensing keys and sliders, the board allows designers to evaluate this interface in their applications. Using the Windows-based mTouch Diagnostic Tool, an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) is included in the mTouch Sensing Solution SDK. The software libraries, source code and other support materials that come with the board further shorten development time and reduce design costs.