Capacitive Touch Sensors in a Grid

Capacitive Touch Sensors in a Grid

It is also possible to take the idea discussed in  Why Keyboards Matter post and tailor it for capacitive touch. This way it also possible to represent 900 individual user inputs with far less microcontroller pins. The main idea behind this…

Why Keyboards Matter

Making a matrix with 9 inputs isn’t all that bad. I wouldn’t mind wiring each one up. But when we get two orders of magnitude bigger to 900, we want something more cleverly constructed, reducing duplicity and manual labor. While…

Prototyping Capacitive Sensors

Previous blog posts explored capacitive sensing and proposed it as ideal for our digital Peabody quilt. However, unlike a smartphone or tablet, we have a very interesting design problem: how can we embody the quilt form and feel such that…

Materials (touch sensing)

The interactions with the Peabody quilt are touch based – the user presses on a square and the LED lights up. Thus, parts of the quilt must be sensitive to touch. There are two potential ways to include touch sensitivity in…

Materials (hardware)

List of Materials: Female DC Power adapter – 2.1mm jack to screw terminal block  – Qty: 2, Price: $4 Tighten the screws to hold the capacitor and power/ground wires in place Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Strip – White 30 LED…

Designing on a Budget

When purchasing materials for the Peabody visualization quilt, we discovered that LEDs are expensive, and budget might be a limiting factor. Subsequently, we constructed our quilt’s physical design around this constraint. To light up our quilt, we purchased strips of digitally-addressable…

Soft-Tech Controllers

In our physical touch-interface version of Elizabeth Peabody’s work, we are going to use a controller separate from the quilt for the purpose of selecting a color/country to begin. We do not yet know what exact form the color picker…

The Digitization of Elizabeth Peabody’s Visualization Work

This project recreates digitally the visualization work of Elizabeth Peabody, a nineteenth-century writer and educator. It is informed by the questions of: “What is the story we tell about the “invention” of modern data visualization techniques? How would that story…