Hi. I'm new to the arduino community and arduino itself and was curious if this may be right the tool for the job. I have a touchscreen pad that I need to hit seven times. Once in the upper left corner, four times in the middle in two different spots, bottom right three times. I can do all this manually in just under 30 seconds but unfortunately I need to do this thousands of times and don't have the time to spend doing that manually. Can ardunio help me out with my problem? What tools would I need. I sent a pic of the device that I'm touching. Any help for a noob would be appreciated. Thanks.
When you know how to write software, then it is possible.
If you are new to programming, then Arduino is a good way to learn it, but not while trying to make this project.
A servo motor is slow, but easy to use. I would use 4 servo motors, one for each location.
It is a capacitive or resistive touchscreen ?
What kind of device are you operating ? Perhaps that device has a serial port and accepts commands.
Koepel:
When you know how to write software, then it is possible.
If you are new to programming, then Arduino is a good way to learn it, but not while trying to make this project.
A servo motor is slow, but easy to use. I would use 4 servo motors, one for each location.
It is a capacitive or resistive touchscreen ?
What kind of device are you operating ? Perhaps that device has a serial port and accepts commands.
Hi. Thanks for the response. I know how to program so I don't think I would have any issues there. It's a diagnostics tool for a car kind of like a GPS. The device does not have a serial port to take commands so the manual touch was the only way to go. Would the servos be able to go through 6-7 clicks in 30 seconds? Speed is ideal. Any suggestions for a good replacement for a finger that can attach to a servo? I appears to be a capacitive touch screen.
This can definitely be done with an Arduino, and it's arguably one of the best tools for the job. Just take a look at all those YouTube videos about brute forcing a phone password using an Arduino to control motors that key in the numbers on a touch screen.
The main issue you may have is tuning the servos so the touch is firm enough to be recorded, but they don't shatter the screen in doing so. Making your mechanical finger spring loaded will help.
eferrer:
Probably over the course of a week or two? Not a good idea? Processor not strong enough?
I'm thinking more about the device not obstructing your view for long. Maybe servos with thin bendable fiberglass arms could tap screen spots from the edges or behind the screen then retract but you got more to do depending on resistive or capacitive touch what kind of fingertips to make besides soft and clean. One servo per spot only requires 1 axis motion per servo and all can deploy close to touch as fast as one, could go really fast on spot-to-spot taps otherwise reaching and tapping gets you to move.
Is it worth making unless needed quite often? I guess it is! Might drive me to find solutions different from yours.
An ATmega328P and many smaller AVR's could do this well at 1 MHz clock speed.
I worked on a project 1987-88 that used IR beam interrupt touch screens, we NEVER had to calibrate those!
eferrer:
It's a capacitive touch screen. Any ideas for a finger alternative?
Just out of curiosity I tried an experiment with my old Samsung phone. Wearing a rubber kitchen glove the screen would not respond but a piece of hex aluminium bar held in the glove would cause a response - for example selecting an image in the gallery. The piece of aluminium I used is about the size of a 15mm cube and I was touching the flat face to the screen.
Robin2:
Just out of curiosity I tried an experiment with my old Samsung phone. Wearing a rubber kitchen glove the screen would not respond but a piece of hex aluminium bar held in the glove would cause a response - for example selecting an image in the gallery. The piece of aluminium I used is about the size of a 15mm cube and I was touching the flat face to the screen.
Note that a metal probe might scratch the screen.
...R
A capacitance touch only needs the "finger" to have capacitance in line with a person's finger. Any conductor in the finger with a good bit of surface more than mass should do especially if it is grounded to the screen device. Foil should be fine, crumpled a bit'd be even better.
A resistance touch screen might do with some conductive plastic sheet on the tip. The stuff comes in megohms per inch but the touch spot can be 2 or 3mm dia and still work. That finger would need to be grounded to the screen device too. I'd make the activation button a cap sense button mounted on the screen frame, out of the way of tapping toy servo fingers -- force isn't needed for touchscreens, presence works.
@GoForSmoke, as far as I know, resistive touch is pressure sensitive. It works like a keyboard. A plastic top and plastic bottom layer with an air gap in between. Pressing the top plastic down connects the invisible conductive traces inside the gap.
Ick. No wonder it has to be recalibrated so often. DIY resistive touch measures voltage between your grounded finger and 4 corners of a poorly conductive surface. The demo used paper coated with graphite.
I thought those cheap buttons have printed mylar or some other metalized surface (like in some PC keyboards as layered contact sheets) on the inside and the artwork on the outside but I haven't looked into one since the 20th century. Our mice had balls back then!
The thin wires are used on touchscreens.... but where you don't have to see through people have used conductive paint/ink to print cap sense rows and columns on 2 sides of a card to make a matrix, put artwork over that and a clear cover. The real nice ones were double-sided PCBs and one etched copper off glass microscope slides, looked great!
For better sensing you surround the touch spot(s) with ground or have a grounded area adjacent to the touch spots. It helps to couple a close finger to a specific spot, youtube has videos showing how at the electrical field level.
If your board supports cap touch, that is a superior kind more like a metal detector, active. There are such Arduinos, I bet the Due has touch sense in hardware.
I wonder if the bubble buttons can be read =as= cap sensors? They're real cheap!
I bought some capacitive touch gloves and cut off the tips and stuck them on the servos but it's only working half of the time. Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?
@GoForSmoke, perhaps there are two types of resistive touch.
@eferrer, GoForSmoke already wrote about: capacitance, surface, mass.
Can you get conductive rubber and connect that also to the ground. I don't know what is best: earth ground, or the ground of the display or the Arduino GND. Perhaps they all are okay.
There needs to be a certain size that touches the screen. Some kind of soft electrical conductive rubber. Perhaps you can make it yourself with silicone and activated carbon.
What about sticking metal foil to that location and turn it on and off with a (reed)relay to ground ? Has someone made such thing ?
eferrer:
I bought some capacitive touch gloves and cut off the tips and stuck them on the servos but it's only working half of the time. Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?
Maybe works because of the pressing. Yours is not a DIY surface.
I remember the resistive touchscreen from 87, the one that convinced us to go with beam interrupt. It had layers of plastic sheet that would slide a tiny bit as it was used necessitating frequent calibration. It's kind of an almost-solution to touch. But that was 1987 and improvements have been made... they slide a bit less?
Your original idea to replicate finger taps may be the best choice short of getting a different screen.
eferrer:
I bought some capacitive touch gloves and cut off the tips and stuck them on the servos but it's only working half of the time. Anyone have any ideas for alternatives?
Try putting a piece of metal inside the tips - as big as possible. AFAIK the gloves are designed to transfer the capacitance of the human to the device. They probably don't have enough capacitance on their own.
