Hi I'm after some advice.
I'm more mechanical than electrical, and more electrical than electronic, so forgive me if this sounds silly.
We recently attended a trade show where one of our display pieces - a plastic cylinder about 450mm diameter x 400mm long, mounted on a metal stand proved almost irresistible to touch.
It's a hot-pink part, in an industrial setting, so it stands out, but people would swerve across the aisle simply to touch it as they walked past. Some would stroke it, some grab it, but it happened all the time across 7 days and thousands of passers by.
It was very noticeable, quite funny and garnered some comments, resulting in a video being taken to show the workforce and for social media use.
The idea has been posited about rigging up a counter to display the number of touches at the next exhibition. (You can tell Covid is a fading memory...)
I'm wondering whether a capacitive sensor and a Raspberry Pi could be made to work, but with the part being non-conductive, and me not knowing much about sensing, I'm not sure if it could be made to work. (I have capacitive level sensors on some machines that I work with, but other than adjusting them for sensitivity now and then, or swapping them out, I don't know a great deal about their capabilities).
Is there any merit in my doing some reading up and experimentation or is this simply a non-starter and I need to look at other ways to register the touches (if indeed it's even possible)?
Many thanks for any advice you can offer.
Rob
I'm more mechanical than electrical, and more electrical than electronic, so forgive me if this sounds silly.
We recently attended a trade show where one of our display pieces - a plastic cylinder about 450mm diameter x 400mm long, mounted on a metal stand proved almost irresistible to touch.
It's a hot-pink part, in an industrial setting, so it stands out, but people would swerve across the aisle simply to touch it as they walked past. Some would stroke it, some grab it, but it happened all the time across 7 days and thousands of passers by.
It was very noticeable, quite funny and garnered some comments, resulting in a video being taken to show the workforce and for social media use.
The idea has been posited about rigging up a counter to display the number of touches at the next exhibition. (You can tell Covid is a fading memory...)
I'm wondering whether a capacitive sensor and a Raspberry Pi could be made to work, but with the part being non-conductive, and me not knowing much about sensing, I'm not sure if it could be made to work. (I have capacitive level sensors on some machines that I work with, but other than adjusting them for sensitivity now and then, or swapping them out, I don't know a great deal about their capabilities).
Is there any merit in my doing some reading up and experimentation or is this simply a non-starter and I need to look at other ways to register the touches (if indeed it's even possible)?
Many thanks for any advice you can offer.
Rob
