justDIY

Hi gang DrBusen dropped me a line on my blog, so I thought I'd say hi! If anyone is interested in building an interface similar to whats documented on my blog (link in previous post), I'd be happy to share source code and/or schematics - my email is gordonthree (a) gmail.com The data my interface outputs is basicly a number between 0 and ~35000 ... but with the practical numbers between 7000 and 25000... and you get a BUNCH of those numbers, one for every sensor in your array. I'm not really sure how you translate that into some sort of usful analog input (like a slider). I did manage to do some simple math on the data to make the interface work as a large group of switches, so they can each be on or off depending on if your finger is present or not. I've worked around ambient light by basiclly 'recalibrating' the interface every few 100 mS ... so the sensor that is 'darkest' sets the ambient light level, which is then subtracted from all the sensors to get a 'baseline', of course this method is not perfect, and in situations of strong ambient light, your finger or an object interacting with the array actually appears darker than the ambient light entering the surrounding sensors, which really messes things up. i'm also having trouble coming up with a method to build large arrays without using a bazillion microcontrollers ... right now to do an 8x8 array would cost 7 microcontrollers (at $3 each), which is not really acceptable ttyl justDIY