Capacitive contact sensing is a tremendous know-how that permits a microcontroller to sense somebody’s contact on – and even close to –an enter. The Raspberry Pi Pico, nevertheless, requires ~1Mohm resistors that pull every IO to floor to ensure that it to carry out capacitive sensing.

Whereas this isn’t too onerous, think about making use of resistors for 10 and even 20 pins and the trouble concerned quickly begins so as to add up. My answer was to construct a helper board – the Pico Contact 2 – that takes care of this for you. It mounts 23 SMD resistors between the GPIO pins and GND, enabling you to easily hook up your capacitive enter pads to the Pico Contact 2 pins.

It’s an attention-grabbing idea, however for example what you are able to do with it I got here up with two demo initiatives. First I recycled a lot of outdated PCBs, utilizing their previously +5V copper layer as an enter pad that covers most of its floor. I glued three of them onto a chunk of MDF. The center PCB made an important controller for the Dinosaur sport as a digital spacebar. The left and proper pads set off key combos that swap browser tabs.

I additionally utilized three units of alligator clips to the RPi/Pico Contact 2 combo. Utilizing the identical code because the PCB setup, the spoons may carry out Dinosaur sport/tabbing as soon as attached. These demos have been programmed in CircuitPython, and a code swap meant that the spoons may additionally act as a quite simple MIDI controller. It was enjoyable to play, and one thing I could revisit on the JCo Audio channel.