Over the past few months I’ve taken a deep dive into one specific project called SPOKE. It is a product I am developing that turns a raspberry pi Pico microcontroller into a super simple, easy to use 26-pin capacative touch board.
The project started out while I was working on some mini instruments for The Beating Birch. I discovered how easy it was to set up capacative touch on the Pico’s and did further tests and soon realised how ridiculously well it worked, and with 26 inputs it offers so much potential for computer interactions.
The board can be coded to be either a USB-MIDI device, or as a keyboard + mouse emulator. The outer pins can be attached to a myriad of materials that can hold an electrical charge to work as touch sensors. So anything from metalic objects, conductive inks, conductive thread, organic material like fruit + veg, it even works with thick pencil lines and through non-condutive surfaces if there’s a large enough area of conductive material on the other side.
Some initial SPOKE tests here:
I’m also going to make a mini version of the PCB for embedding into projects.The current plan is to work on a kickstarter, to properly produce the hardware, to build a whole host of educational resources around it plus hopefully involve a community of makers who could use the embedded verion in their own products to sell forwards.
I want to make customising and coding this project as easy as possible, so I’ve been using CircuitPython to run everything, which can be edited in notepad! So no fancy ide’s need to be downloaded. I’ve set up various example codes for different MIDI modes, also for keyboard emulators (useful for custom game controllers, or software hotkey mapping). All you would need to do is to copy/paste the example code and change a few numbers to change what notes get played, or what chords, or sequences, or phrases etc.
If you’re interested in the project, or even want to build your own version (open source ftw), then head to https://www.spokeboard.com/ sign up for the newsletter and follow the project on instagram.
Vulpes Labs 