Friday Product Post: How Touching
An update to our classic Capacitive Touch Breakout, as well as a new sibling to join it! Happy Friday, everyone!
Hello there, everyone, and thank you for joining us for another Friday Product Post! We have a couple of really handy capacitive touch breakouts today. Though both of these breakouts feature the AT42QT101X chipset, they differ slightly and, for some projects, significantly.
In addition to these two new breakouts, we are releasing a small strip of Balun "Ding and Dent" transformers that you might find useful in some of your future projects. Now, without wasting too much more time, let's take a closer look at all of our new products!
Such a touching sentiment!
If you need to add user input without using a button, then a capacitive touch interface might be the answer. The AT42QT1011 SparkFun Capacitive Touch Breakout offers a single capacitive touch button with easy-to-use digital I/O pins. The AT42QT1011 is a dedicated, single-button capacitive sense chip. The chip handles monitoring a conductive area for touch.
The AT42QT1011 does not have an internal time-out, meaning that if you hold your finger to the breakout’s pad for any length of time, it will stay on.
We've actually been carrying the AT42QT1010 Breakout for quite some time, but it recently received a face-lift to help distinguish it from our AT42QT1011 breakout, and we wanted to point out the difference between the two.
Though they are both Capacitive Touch Breakouts, the AT42QT1010 does feature an internal time-out, so if your finger remains on the pad for more than 60 seconds, it will turn off.
This is a simple strip of five signal-conditioning Balun Ember Transformers from Wurth Elektronik that allows you to convert an unbalanced signal in a transmission line to a balanced one, or vice versa. Each of these ICs possesses a frequency range of 2400MHz to 2500MHz with an impedance of 50 ohms unbalanced and 100 ohms balanced.
These specific transformers were once used in our ATmega128RFA1 Development Board but, sadly, are no longer needed. We have made them available at a drastically reduced price for anyone who could possibly use one (or five) of these handy little ICs.
And that's it for this week, folks! Make sure to check back next week for our announcement of a very special partnership with two very good friends of ours. As always, we can't wait to see what you make with these products! Shoot us a tweet @sparkfun, or let us know on Instagram or Facebook. We’d love to see what projects you’ve made!
Thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next week with even more fantastic new products!
