A dear friend of mine recently sent me a very interesting idea for a new project, and I decided to pick it up and got working at it as soon as I could. His idea was to build a digital kitchen timer that operates like the USB volume knob I built a while ago. I didn’t just want to recycle an old design, and the USB volume knob would be pretty unsanitary in a kitchen anyway. So we came up with a new idea that involves capacitive touch sensing and an Arduino, and this series of articles discusses each part of the project from the first idea, to the theoretical aspects, all the way to the hardware and software. I decided to write this series as the project goes along (similarly to the older word clock series), so things are subject to changes. However, I think this gives you a good opportunity to see just how much trial and error goes into such a project, and I hope I can help you avoid mistakes that I make by documenting them.
Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 1