cyancdesign [Chris Yanc]

So this is a long time coming. Many months ago I decided I wanted to try using capacitive foil.

After searching around for a while, I decided to try the Visual Planer's Interactive Foil. I found the local distributor for the US at Brookview Technologies. My sales contact there has been very helpful through the whole selling and shipping process. To build a good size prototype, I decided to go with the 50" 16:9 display.

So now I have the foil in hand, but nothing to attach it to. Time to put a call into my acrylic supplier, they also have a CNC machine so cutting the 1/2 acrylic to the exact size was a piece of cake. And the last bit of the puzzle was how to display the acrylic.

I've been working with Robeck Fluid Power Co. in Aurora OH. Another outstanding group when it comes to customer service and capabilities. I contracted them to build a display stand out of aluminum railing so that 1. it could be collapsible and easy to transport and 2. be able to change orientation between a vertical and horizontal display.

The results:

Unpacking the Capacitive Foil

The Foil Wrapped Up

The Frame Pieces

Acrylic Mounted in Aluminum Frame

The Legs

The Frame in Two Parts

The Full Display Stand

Testing the Projection: Using only poster paper, the projector: Optoma EP721

So the foil itself. Well, it functions.  The computer running it is only an Intel Core2Duo, 2 Gb of RAM, and Nvidia Graphics card (nothing too special). So there could be a faster computer running it, I'm just out of computers to use for interactive displays (^_^) which is good and bad i suppose.

I'm still getting used to the settings of the drivers. It currently is beta testing a faux dual touch driver. Which either creates custom data to be used in Java, or 2 touches mimic a mouse wheel scroll up or down. The have told me they are working on windows 7 integration. So I look forward to seeing that pan out. For now, I'll start creating something I'm comfortable with, some nice Flash Demo apps... Now what would be something useful?

And here is a little video I put together for you to enjoy.

Happy Experimenting.

Tags: aluminum railing, Capacitive Foil, prototype, Touchscreen

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 10:57 pm and is filed under cyancdesign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.