This is the fourth video in a series in which I'll be considering various methods that can be used to replace a traditional Arduino button input with a touch-free interface instead, requiring no physical contact. This is just one possible consideration of how you can make an escape room (or any other public-facing Arduino interface) more "Covid-secure".
In this part I'll be looking at an "Capacitive Touch Sensor" CAP1188 component, which costs around $10, can be purchased from several online suppliers and is easy to wire and code on an Arduino, ESP32, or other Microprocessor using an I2C interface.
They can be purchased from, e.g. www.banggood.com/custlink/3v3...
Though some capacitive sensors work by physical touch (e.g. those on a mobile phone screen), by increasing the sensitivity of the board (which can be done by writing a registry value through code), it is possible to detect a hand (or a glass of water, metallic object, or any other object with sufficient capacitance) at a distance of about 15cm from the sensor, with no need for contact. There are 8 different inputs, each with an onboard LED and corresponding output pin, and the readings can be extracted via SPI or I2C interface.