14 DAY TRIAL // Since smartphones have been using touch-based input and gesture tracking for years, a pair of electronics designers figured it was high time every other gadget in the world got similar capabilities.
If you're unfamiliar with the Arduin platform, you might want to know that it's the prototyping/design electronics platform at the basis of most DIY gadgets and electronic toys out there.
It's a good educational tool, and supports easy expansion. Like, say, being able to integrate touch capability as soon as a module for it was created.
Inventors Emran Mahbub and Jonathan Li have introduced Hover, a capacitive touch sensitive printed circuit board.
It has a tiny controller inside, which can not only track fingers as they touch the surface, but can “see” you wave your hand and flick your fingers as well.
A 3-volt power supply keeps everything running, which is important because the small size of the module means it should be usable in very small things indeed, things that have very weak batteries compared to phones, tablets and everything else.
Toy robots capable of “interacting” with your kid is one possible application of Hover, and maybe someone could even make the jumping bot react to your gestures instead of a phone app.