Thin film based printed electronic user interface for capacitive touch surfaces

This project aims to provide the user with a system that can turn any surface into a capacitive touch based surface which can interact and respond to external human stimuli; using the fingers in particular.The project is a self sufficient, self-contained piece of hardware capable of running at low power without any effect on performance. The hardware built consists of an acrylic transparent sheet or OHP sheet as the base while supporting the delicate printed circuitry that will sense the finger proximity and will respond according to a set of gestures and orientations of the hand in consideration. A few use cases of the above project to demonstrate its capability are as follows:

1. Transforming a surface into a theremin for producing sounds of varying pitch and hence the music. The instrument’s controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.The theremin will be a  with a 1-octave capacitive touch instrument in this case.It has Audio/CV/Gate outputs and 6 synth parameters. The synthesizer parameter include:DCO: Coarse pitch and Double. The CV out follows the keyboard and coarse pitch.
   DCF: Filter peak and ENVmod.
   ENV: Attack and Release affecting amplitude.
2. An interactive user interface that recognizes gestures to perform a specific function or a set of functions to control IoT based devices. Hence the system in this case will act as a user interface for controlling purposes.
3. A flexible low power display that can display output just like a normal LCD or e-ink based paper display.

The system being run on low power can be easily powered via the wireless power kit being used for the contest without any effect on the output. The thin sheets being flexible can be used on any surface and can even be folded according to specific needs.