Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
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Look what the mail man brought in today. This little beauty here to your right is a prototype of the new upcoming Mindsensors Numeric Pad. It’s a very nice capacitance proximity detection based keypad meaning it can tell when you’re touching it without the need for actual switches. That does mean that if you like to wear gloves while working with your robot, you will only be able to make it work if you wield a hotdog-type sausage.
Using it is as easy as as reading the 2 registers containing the state of each key in binary format. The only small tricky bit is that you need to configure some registers first to “tune” the chip. Lucky for us, Mindsensors has all those values available in the NXC library. I can’t wait to make this thing work in ROBOTC. You can expect a driver for this sensor in the next release of the ROBOTC Driver Suite.
I agree, it is a very nice sensor, and it is 100% silent, thanks to the sensing used. The only things I really think should be changed, is putting the port on the back of it, and also having the letters a-z on the buttons 2-9 as most phone pads have. Overall, it is very wonderful.
Wow, looks neat! I especially like the fact that they used capacitive keys on there. Ever since I got an PMP with a capacitive touchpad I’ve wanted to ditch all things resistive :). And, you can actually use gloves with things like these. Check out the Instructables that explains how @ http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-A-Glove-Work-With-A-Touch-Screen/
Thanks for the review!
I’ve been eagerly awaiting this sensor for a while. I nearly purchased a standard Numeric Pad the last time or ordered some chips & bits and interface it it to a PCF8574. I was troubled with how best too house my home-brew version while using a very thin sticky-back Numeric Pad I came across. So I never got any further.
I must agree with Matthew in regards to the socket position. Provided they haven’t started production it should be an easy fix. An Alpha-numeric typical type layout would also be a lot more flexible than what’s been used. This could be issue should also be an easy change to the Silkscreen Layout.
All the minor issues aside, it will be a very handy addition to the Sensor collection.
Hello
I’m a bit sceptic of the usability of this, perhaps a track-pad as in our laptop (i2c) would have been more fun and allowing more user interaction.
Ben
Ben,
There are plenty of times where I would’ve liked to have been able to enter a number directly into my NXT. I think a proper laptop-like keypad would be way too big. You would need a massive area on your robot to put this. The pads on this are big enough so that even someone like me, with rather big hands and thick fingers, can press these buttons without covering 3 other keys at the same time.
It seems I misread your comment. You meant a trackpad, not a numpad. Either way, a trackpad would have to be pretty big, too. The screen on the NXT is much too small to warrant this kind of input, IMHO.