New here but i just have a quick question.. I am making a wearable set of capacitive buttons (copper strips). The plan was to have one on the back of each glove in a pair of fingerless gloves, so i could reach over with the opposite hand and tap the strip to activate.
My question after reading on the CapacitiveSensor library is pertaining to the heavy emphasis on tying the connections to ground.. It's not always guaranteed that I'll be grounded when wearing these gloves, so what alternatives does that leave me with? It may be a dumb question but would running a wire from the arduino's ground to some point on my skin suffice? Maybe there is something to be gained from how a mobile phone's screen still works when held?
If it does involve running ground to my body am i in danger if the ground is common among batteries that are driving motors etc?
Ground is just a common level where the voltages are based on. You don't have to connect your body to the ground (although this should be any problem, even with some motors attached), the capacitive sensors works by changing the capacity of a metal plate if you approach it with your fingers.
The grounding of the Arduino board is very important in capacitive sensing. The board needs to have some connection to ground, even if this is not a low-impedance path such as a wire attached to a water pipe.
Is what worried me initially, of course I'll know for sure this weekend when i can actually build something
The problem is, that the change in capacity of that sensor is extremely low, so the circuit has to be very sensible to detect it. If you connect your laptop the Arduino while sensing but not grounding the board as described it's quite probable that it won't work. So either do a proper grounding of the Arduino or make it self-contained (with no outside connection at all), at least that's my understanding of it (I'm not an expert in this regard). I don't know if it works with the very simple example from the playground but there are lot's of sensors working exactly the same way in wearable electronic devices which also don't have a fixed ground nor a body connection.
