Building capacitive sensitive floor tiles
Sunday, November 22, 2009
That title’s a mouthful but you’re already familiar with the technology and application of foot pads as sensors in games like Dance Dance Revolution. The usbddr project sought to make a USB connected DDR controller from scratch. The microcontroller used is an Atmel ATmega8 running the V-USB firmware for connectivity and uses the analog to digital converts to read in data from the capacitive sensors.
The physical implementation is cleaver. The base plate has a capacitor plate attached to the top of it and the tile has the other capacitor plate attached to the bottom of it. The two are separated by some weather-stripping which is spongy enough to allow compression, bringing the two capacitor plates together.
We’re not convinced of the long-term durability of the system. We certainly don’t think it will hold up to very much hard-core DDR playing. But we would love to see a Super Mario RPG style puzzle to unlock the door to the ‘castle’ at a child’s birthday party.
[Thanks Hans]
4 komentar:
This is interesting, I think the interest in DDR has mostly faded but they used a mega8 chip and managed to connect it directly to USB. I didn’t think that was possible! Googling for v-usb now.
@mowcius that sounds like a good idea, then they don’t even need to worry about the mechanical parts failing. Would it cause any issues if you were to touch two capacitive points at the same time? But a touch sensor design would only work if they were playing barefoot. Correct?
Presumably this kind of thing could be done truly capacitance sensing with one sheet of copper sensing the capacitance of the person standing on it. It is a very simple circuit to do and can sense distance from actually touching to a couple of metres.
What you ‘really’ need to be doing is creating capacitive floor titles which store the energy into batteries, which can then be used to interface into your home or some other circuit. Think GREEN…
Could not find a suitable section so I written here, how to become a moderator for your forum, that need for this?
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