Capacitive Touch Paper Game Controller

A game controller that can be any shape you want!

Comment 1

Inspiration

I will be holding a paper circuits stall at ScienceX 2018 in Manchester. The aim is to inspire and educate the general public on the exciting world of science and engineering. Among my stall activities, I wanted to be able to introduce embedded systems to the public in an entertaining method. Researching further into how I could incorporate a paper circuit interface to my embedded system, I came across the CapacitiveSensor library for arduino. I decided to create two capacitive sensor projects; a paper piano and a paper game controller.

What it does

It takes capacitive sensed key presses and replicates a corresponding keyboard key press on the host computer (Yes, with the same code and hardware, a full capacitive touch keyboard can be implemented - but this was outside the scope of my activity).

How I built it

Schematics and images will be uploaded shortly.

What's next for Capacitive Touch Paper Game Controller

Create a circular sensor "pad" with many segregated sectors to mimic a "quantized" joy stick - although this will require many pins and may involve a multiplexer due to the limited number of arduino pins.

Built With

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Updates

posted an update —

The event was a HUGE success. ScienceX was awarded a silver award in the Best Event category at the CIPR Pride Awards North West. With an estimated 800+ visitors to the stall, we performed better than I had initially anticipated. The images shown were all taken shortly after starting, the numbers from then on were too overwhelming to take pictures. As the stall was called 'Paper Circuits' I had planned a further two activities relating to lighting LEDs on a sheet of paper. Due to the sheer number of people at the stall at all times, I decided to not entertain the longer of the two due to concerns of throughput. Nevertheless, the children received all the activities really well and were very keen to demonstrate their creativity.

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