Waterproof Capacitive Touch
As touch technology has been a focus for displays and interactive video, there are other harsh condition applications that can utilize touch sensing rather than mechanical controls. For waterproof (rather than just water resistant) applications – hospitals, medical equip, and outdoor industrial controls, and wet application infotainment control.
Most of the capactive touch technologies work by detecting the capacitance change of your finger being added to the surface of the area being checked. This has the issue of not working when it is really cold, if the person touching the surface has on a glove or when there is water presentt. Microchip has a new chipset that supports an mTouch interface though plastic, glass, metal and stainless steel. The ability to use vandal proof materials such as stainless steel and aluminum brings the soft touch control capability to appliances and other tactile feedback interface systems including those that require braille markings.
The technology works by sensing the capacitive change between the top layer of the switch and the electronics layer. This allows the top layer to be sealed and still operate with out the mechanical wear and tear that is normally associated with weatherproof switches. The solution can use a number of the 8.16 and 32 bit PIC processors and the full open source code base and hardware development kits that are part of the mTouch family.
The touch interface is nose tolerant to both raidiated and conducted noise due to the high SNR spec of the product. This technology allows for mixed interface devices such as those with standard capacitive touch displays and also main operation buttons (open/close of safety panel, on/off, etc) can be done with the waterproof technology.
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