Until we can use the CNC again....

...the most exciting thing about getting a CNC machine working is the ability to quickly and easily drill our home-etched PCBs. But also, the ability to carve shapes and make enclosures for forthcoming projects is pretty cool too.

We've a few projects in the pipeline, which make use of some pretty simple but powerful underlying technology. After running a few workshops in and around Brighton and receiving a few emails from previous posts on other projects, we're going to document these in their entirety.

We'll be using the 18F2455 and 18F4550 PIC microcontrollers to create USB/HID devices. And we're also incorporating a simple touch-sensitive interface. At the minute, capacitive touch sensors are all the rage. What this basically means is that each touch pad connects to a microcontroller and when the user places their finger over the pad, a simple capacitor is created. The relative capacitance of the pad is compared over time and when the capacitance changes, the microcontroller can detect whether a finger has been placed near or removed from the pad.

The downside of capacitance touch sensing is the need for relatively large pads - or dedicated capacitive sensing hardware.

To keep our project simple - both in writing the firmware (capacitive sensing firmware can be quite convoluted and multiple readings averaged over time to smooth out any rogue analogue readings) and in sourcing the hardware - we're going to use an alternative approach:

A transistor is often used as an electronic switch, but it can also be used as an amplifier. A tiny current onto the base pin of an NPN transistor allows a much larger current to flow through the collector and emitter pins.



Whatever current is directed onto the base pin is amplified onto the collector pin.
By "feeding" the output from one transistor into the base pin of a second transistor, we can amplify the input signal many thousands of times over



In fact, by feeding one transistor into another, even the tiny amount of current that passes over the surface of your skin can be used as a switch. Such transistor pairs are available in a single package, known as a Darlington transistor.

Here's an example of how we can use a darlington transistor as a touch sensitive input device for a PIC microcontroller:

The schematic above uses a darlington transistor, such as a BC517 as a single discrete component. Although a darlington transistor is actually two transistors connected as shown above, we will draw it as a single transistor for simplicity.

Touching the two pads - however large or small they may be - causes the transistor to switch, forcing the current to flow from the input pin to ground. While this may seem counter-intuitive (normally you might expect voltage to flow into an input pin to indicate an input switch) the reason for this should become clear: on a lot of controllers (and had we put this input onto PORTB) you can use internal pull up resistors on the inputs, removing the need for the external resistor as shown in this example. If your controller does not have internal pull-ups, the resistor is there to stop the input pin "floating" when no finger is present on the contacts. The resistor should be quite a high value, say 100K.
Now, when the pads are touched, a tiny current flows from 5v on PAD1, over your finger, onto PAD2 and into the base of the darlington transistor. The transistor amplifies this current, creating a "switching effect" and causes the input pin to go low.
When the finger is removed off the pads, no more current flows into the base pin, the transistor closes the "switch" and no current can flow from the input pin to ground. The pull-up resistor causes the input pin to go high when the pads are not touched.

Although the above gives us a working touch-sensitive switch, we're not quite done. If you try the schematic out, you might find - depending on the type of darlington transistor used - that while the "on" trigger works (i.e. the input goes low immediately after touching the pads) the "off" time can be quite slow (i.e. the input pin remains low for a second or more after removing your finger from the pads).

The reason for this is that the darlington transistor can amplify even the tiniest little current - even residual electrical noise can be used as a trigger; it's a bit like leaving an input pin floating - the base pin of the transistor is so sensitive it can switch on and off almost at random. And like a floating input pin, it can remain active even when the input is removed.



The answer is to put a pull-down resistor on the base pin.
Now, when your finger is removed, any residual current on the base pin has a path to ground, and the switch closes. The size of the resistor determines the response time. If the resistor value is too low, it may stop the transistor switching on at all (the human body has an electric resistance of around 40k-100k so this base resistor needs to be much higher) but too high and the residual current on the base pin may take too long to be pulled to ground, resulting in slow response times. In practice, we found that a resistor with a 1M resistor on the base pin (R2), with a 100K pull-up resistor (R1) on the input pin worked well and gave reasonable response times.