Give Your Pi Pico Captouch Inputs For All Your Music Needs

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The board in question, with a Pi Pico soldered on, with old PCBs for macropads being used as captouch electrodes

Unlike many modern microcontrollers, RP2040 doesnā€™t come with a native capacitive touch peripheral. This doesnā€™t mean you canā€™t do it ā€“ the usual software-driven way works wonderfully, and only requires an external pullup resistor! In case you wanted a demonstration or you have a capacitive touch project in mind, this lighthearted video by [Jeremy Cook] is a must watch, and heā€™s got a healthy amount of resources for you in store, too!

In this video, [Jeremy] presents you with a KiCad schematic and an PCB design you can use to quickly add whole 23 capacitive touch sensing inputs to a Pi Pico! The board is flexible mechanically, easy to assemble as [Jeremy] demonstrates, and all the pins involved can still be used as regular GPIOs if youā€™d like. Plus, itā€™s fully open-source, can easily be assembled on your own, and available on Tindie too!

Of course, such a board doesnā€™t get created for no reason ā€“ [Jeremy] has a healthy amount of musical creations and nifty ideas to show off. We quite liked the trick of using old PCBs as capacitive touch sensing, using copper fills as electrodes ā€“ which has helped create an amusing ā€œmacropad of macropadsā€, and, thereā€™s quite a bit more to see.

If capacitive touch projects ever struck a chord with you and you enjoy music-related hacking, [Jeremy]ā€™s got a whole YouTube channel you ought to check out. Oh, and if one of the musical projects in the video caught your eye, it might just be the one weā€™ve featured previously!



from Blog ā€“ Hackaday https://ift.tt/GWmF50I

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