I'm going to design a new toy for my daughter. I'm looking for a cascadeable touch sensor that allows me to put a lot of them using few signal lines - an SPI needs a CS line for each one and I2C needs a different address for each one.
I need to put lot of them, ideally some hundreds. Something like a WS2812, of course allowing me to read the data.
Furthermore I would like to read an "analog" register, to have an indication about how far is the finger, not only a digital 0..1.
you probably would be better off with a capacitive surface (like what's on the screen of your smartphone) or possibly a pressure sensitive one (resistive) if you intend to press with a stylus
you'll detect the finger position or positions (if you have a multi-touch one) as an (x,y) coordinate.
(look for "touch screen digitiser" or something like that )
Thanks for the hint. In the final design, near each touch sensor I will put a WS2812 LED which will be colored by the intensity read from the related touch sensor. Even if I put all the sensors (and LEDs) in a grid-manner, I can activate dozens of sensors at time, ie. covering them with my hands.
I'm reading about the digitizers, but if I'm not wrong, it seems the don't fit here.
OK if the need is to be able to activate tons of sensors in one go then the typical screen digitiser might not cut it (the advanced ones detect 10 fingers).
I would still contemplate small capacitive touch detector with a WS2812 LED and a small MCU in each unit. Then it's a matter of having a bus of some sort to connect them all together...
The product exists ( Creative Hexagonal Lamps that you can arrange in the shape you want)
