Touch Board Interactive Development Board

Bare Conductive Touch Board: a serious contender for Makey Makey

Electronics enthusiasts of all ages have lived through a small revolution with the introduction of the Makey Makey Kit, an HID board enabling them to transform anything into an interactive electronic component.

The Touch Board operates on a similar principle: 12 capacitive electrodes, I/O pins triggering an MP3 decoder, and sufficient memory for storing sound clips and other multimedia files.

You can also use the Touch Board with electric paint (sold separately) to design your own circuits: this electric paint from Bare Conductive allows you to draw electrical circuits, buttons, or sensors on paper or directly on the wall!

A board that’s very close to an Arduino

Other real plus of the Touch Board: its Arduino software and hardware compatibility. You can make the most of a wide array of programmes and lines of code to develop the Arduino’s programming environment.

On the Bare Conductive website, you’ll find numerous tutorials from the community, always very productive and inventive. You can now complete your craziest projects!

Technical specifications of the Touch Board

• Atmel ATmega32U4 microcontroller
• Touch IC: MPR121 resurgent semiconductor
• MP3 decode IC: VLSI solution VS1053b
• Audio output: 15 mW into 32 Ohms via a 3.5 mm stereo socket
• Removable storage: up to 32 GB via microSD card
• Supply voltage: 3–5.5 Vdc
• Operating voltage: 5 Vdc
• Max. output current (5V rail): 400 mA (100 mA at start-up)
• Max. output current (3.3V rail): 300 mA
• LiPo 3.7V cell connector: 2-way JST PH series (pin 1 +ve, pin 2 -ve)
• LiPo charge current: 200 mA
• 12 capacitive touch electrodes (of which 8 can be configured as digital I/Os)
• 20 digital I/O pins (of which 3 are used for the MPR121 and 5 are used for the VS1053b — the latter can be unlinked via solder blobs)
• 7 PWM channels (shared with digital I/O pins)
• 12 analogue channels (shared with digital I/O pins)
• Flash memory: 32 KB (ATmega32U4), of which 4 KB are used by the bootloader
• SRAM: 2.5 KB (ATmega32U4)
• EEPROM: 1 KB (ATmega32U4)
• Clock speed: 16 MHz (ATmega32U4), 12.288 MHz (VS1053b)
• DC current per I/O pin: 40 mA sink and source (ATmega32U4), 12 mA source/1.2 mA sink (MPR121)
• Analogue input resistance: 100 MOhms (ATmega32U4)

Resources for the Touch Board programming board

Check out the list of links below: there is no lack of help available for the Touch Board!

• Getting started with the Bare Conductive Touch Board
• Getting started with the Bare Conductive Touch Board
• Technical data
• Shield compatibility
• Pin map
• Setting up a workshop
• Techniques and inspiration
• Basic projects
• Digital toolkit

• Touch Board Video
• Touch Board Pin map
• 5 ways you can use with your Touch Board
• How to clean the electrodes
• How to do Projection mapping with the Touch Board
• Sound Library
• Touch Board + MaxMSP
• Touch Board + Ableton Live
• Touch Board + Grapher
• Make a MIDI guitar with the Touch Board
• Touch Board as an HID keyboard
• Planning and running a workshop with Bare Conductive
• How to run a STEAM workshop with Bare Conductive?
• How to run a music workshop with Bare Conductive?