A lot of consumer gadgets use touch sensors now. It is a cheap and reliable way to replace a variety of knobs and switches on everything from headphones to automobiles. However, creating a custom ...

You can’t have a touch sensitive switch without a way to detect the presence of a finger! A touch sensor, especially a capacitive touch sensor, has some surprisingly sophisticated electronics to ...

Most proximity sensors use an electromagnetic field to sense the presence of a target metal. But there are times when it's necessary to sense nonmetallic materials such as plastics, liquids, or ...

Depending upon the distance between the surface of a capacitance probe and a target source, the electrical capacitance that is formed between these two objects will vary. In an effort to improve ...

Capacitive sensing is a contactless-sensing technique with numerous applications, ranging from proximity sensing (Fig. 1), gesture recognition, automotive rain sensors, and remote liquid-level sensing ...

Liquid-level sensing based on capacitive sensors comes with its own challenges. It’s like absolute capacitance sensing. Unlike touch detection, the absolute value of the liquid level needs to be ...

Capacitive touch sensors are entirely in the domain of DIY, requiring little more than a carefully-chosen conductive surface and a microcontroller. This led [John Phillips] to ask why not embed such ...