Abstract
The market for interactive platforms is rapidly growing, and touchscreens have been incorporated in an increasing number of devices. Thus, the area of smart objects and devices is strongly increasing by adding interactive touch and multimedia content, leading to new uses and capabilities. In this work, a flexible screen printed sensor matrix is fabricated based on silver ink in a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. Diamond shaped capacitive electrodes coupled with conventional capacitive reading electronics enables fabrication of a highly functional capacitive touchpad, and also allows for the identification of marked objects. For the latter, the capacitive signatures are identified by intersecting points and distances between them. Thus, this work demonstrates the applicability of a low cost method using royalty-free geometries and technologies for the development of flexible multitouch touchpads for the implementation of interactive and object recognition applications.
Highlights
Innovations in the areas of materials development and production are strongly affecting information and communication technologies, with a strong impact in a large variety of human activities, ranging from industrial processes to entertainment
We present a method for producing an opaque projected capacitive touch surface, based on the mutual-capacitance method, with the corresponding readout electronics and software data treatment
The printed matrix was fabricated with a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate and two printed silver layer patterns, one on each side
Summary
Innovations in the areas of materials development and production are strongly affecting information and communication technologies, with a strong impact in a large variety of human activities, ranging from industrial processes to entertainment. Circuit printing methods and sensitive electronics are enabling materials and digital technology to work together as complementing parts of novel devices, allowing to present information in a large variety of forms, colours, and textures [2,3,4] and at the same time allowing for the development of a new generation of sensors and actuators. In this context, the touch sensors market and applications have experienced a strong growth mostly based on capacitive technologies, since the iPhone® had its debut back in 2007 [5,6]. The self-capacitance consists in analyzing the capacitance of the electrodes to ground, when a finger is placed close together to the electrode
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