Sam talks shop about Resistive Touch with Makey Makey. This is the default configuration for Makey Makey and requires a conductive circuit to trigger.

Transcript

Hey guys, Sam here from Core Electronics and today we’re going to be taking a look at Resistive Touch with the Makey Makey. So if you haven’t checked out our previous tutorial on what is Makey Makey then I recommend going ahead and having a look at that,

Today we’re going to have a look at how the Makey Makey operates in the standard configuration with the standard software that is loaded up on this to work with what is called resistive touch. Now resistive touch is based upon resistance as the title infers and the way the Makey Makey works is we’ve got these trigger pads here and some more on the back and they’re our inputs and those inputs are usually held to a higher voltage and when they are pulled down to a low voltage by being connected to one of these earth pads here it will trigger the input. So I can touch the arrow key here and touch my other finger here and it will trigger that action. Or I can use the down arrow, the up arrow, anything I want to do with that. Now you’ll notice that if I just touch it with one finger nothing happens. That is because I’m not forming a circuit, so we need to connect something from one of the input pins through to one of the earth pins so the current can flow between there and form our circuit. Which is why something needs to be touching the earth and then I can touch any of the other pins that I might want which is really cool. Now the way the Makey Makey is designed is it doesn’t need to be super conductive, in fact just about anything will work. I’ve got 2 oranges here and these oranges are going to work for a little page scroller here, you could use them to control a simple game. You can use a graphite pencil, so a standard lead pencil and you can draw your circuit on paper, connect your alligator clips up and that is going to form a circuit as well because it’s slightly conductive. Our bodies are conductive, these oranges are conductive, lots and lots of things are conductive. Now if I hold this and tap the oranges it acts like the up and down arrow keys. But if I just tap the oranges by themselves nothing is going to happen because there is no circuit between these pads and the ground. So that is pretty cool and as we were talking about in the last tutorial the Makey Makey is based on the Arduino platform, it’s got am AT32MegaU4 microprocessor on board that is reprogrammable over USB so you can simply connect it up to your computer, open Arduino and reprogram it however you like.  Now this is really cool because whilst the resistive touch that Makey Makey ships with is great and all but sometimes it’s a bit limiting to have to touch and to have to hold the ground pin and touch other things at the same time so we’re going to take a look at a way we can get rid of that in whats called capacitive touch. So check out our tutorial on capacitive touch and we’re going to be looking at reprogramming the Makey Makey board to do a few more things with it. That’s all for now, check out our other tutorials and have a great day :-)

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