Capacitive Touch Sensor for pic16F84A (no special hardware required)

Here is my newest project I've been working on. I'll get more details up when I have the time. In the mean while enjoy the video.

 

Update: Sorry its been awhile since my last update. I've been busy with work and my other projects. The capacitive sensing input is really simple because everything is done in software. Here's my hand drawn schematic for the input stage generalized so that any mcu can be used (For some reason I haven't yet installed a schematic program on my netbook and I don't feel like booting up my other laptop).

It's amazing that all you really need is a single gpio and a resistor (the capacitance is provided by the traces on the breadboard). The ten megaohm resistor allows the discharge rate for the stray capacitance to be slowed down enough for the uC to measure. The uC just continually charges up this capacitance, puts the pin into high impedance by making it an input, and then counts until it measures the "capacitor" is discharged. This count can then be analyzed to determine if the pin has been pressed or not (the count increases if the button is pressed because your finger adds to the stray capacitance in parallel which increases the discharge time). That's pretty much all that's necessary other than some fancy algorithms for error proofing detection.

Update 2: I've finally gotten around to porting my capacitive touch sensing code to C. The code should work for most PICs and can be easily modified to change pin assignments and whatnot to work on any other chip you might need. Below you will find the function freqcapsense. All you need to do is call it and it will sense whether RA0 is being touch or not. I've included averaging multiple samples and an adjustable threshold in order to tweak the sensitivity and accuracy for any given setup. You can have it return a 1 or 0 for touch status or by commenting out the if else statement at the end and uncommenting the return current statement it will return the raw period value it is reading from the pin. Enjoy.

int freqcapsense(){
    unsigned int avg;
    unsigned int current=0;
    unsigned int thresh=29;

    unsigned int trials=10;

    while(trials>0){
        TRISA=0b0;
        RA0=1;
        delay();
        TRISA=0b1;
        while(RA0==1){current++;}
        trials--;
        avg=(avg+current)/2;
    }

    if((current-avg)>thresh){return 1;}
    else{return 0;}

    //return current;
}