capsense without foil but with a few meters of copper wire?

Other Hardware Sensors
1

hi,

http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor

does this capsense method also work without a foil area? but only with a long copper wire (2mm diameter or so)?

for i project i would need to sense touch (or better very close proximity) with 6 meters of such wire.

a few weeks ago i did some experiments and it kind of worked.

today i tried to make it more reliable but i didn't get it to work at all anymore. maybe some grounding issue or something but i wasn't able to figure it out.

do you have any tips how to make this work? is this even feasible? would it be better to use insulated or non-insulated wire (so far i tried it with an insulated one)?

in the above link they talk about an antenna. is my wire such an antenna?

i would be happy about any responses. :slight_smile:

2

is my wire such an antenna?

Yes, a pretty good one. It will pick up interference from radio and TV stations, light fixtures, house wiring, motors, moving automobiles, etc.

3

ok, so this won't work? :slight_smile: or are there any tricks to stop the inferferences somewhat?

would it be possible to split it up into 1 meter segments and use shielded cables to connect the segments to the arduino?

4

Try it and see!