editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Sensing the Squish

We’re used to touch being about locating one or more fingers or items on a surface. This is inherently a 2D process. Although much more richness is being explored for the long-term, one third dimension that seems closer in is pressure: how hard are we pushing down, and can we use that to, for instance, grab an object for dragging?

At the 2011 Touch Gesture Motion conference, one company that got a fair bit of attention was Flatfrog, who uses a light-based approach, with LEDs and sensors around the screen to triangulate positions. At the 2012 Touch Gesture Motion conference, when 2D seemed so 2011, pressure was a more frequent topic of conversation. But clearly a visual technology like Flatfrog’s wouldn’t be amenable to measuring pressure since there is nothing to sense the pressure.

Unless…

If you have a squishy object like a finger, then you can use what I’ll call the squish factor to infer pressure. This is what Flatfrog does: when a finger (for example) touches down, they normalize the width of the item, and then they track as that width widens due to the squishing of the finger (or whatever). Which means that this works with materials that squish. Metal? Not so much.

You might wonder how they can resolve such small movements using an array of LEDs that are millimeters apart. For a single LED and an array of sensors, for example, the resolution might indeed be insufficient. But because they have so many LEDs, the combined measurements from all of them allow them to resolve small micro-structures.

There is a cost to this, of course, in processing: it adds about 100 million instructions per second to the processing. “Ouch!” you say? Actually, it’s not that bad: their basic processing budget without pressure is about 2 billion instructions per second, so this is about a 5% adder.

More information at their website

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
May 25, 2023
Register only once to get access to all Cadence on-demand webinars. Unstructured meshing can be automated for much of the mesh generation process, saving significant engineering time and cost. However, controlling numerical errors resulting from the discrete mesh requires ada...
May 24, 2023
Accelerate vision transformer models and convolutional neural networks for AI vision systems with the ARC NPX6 NPU IP, the best processor for edge AI devices. The post Designing Smarter Edge AI Devices with the Award-Winning Synopsys ARC NPX6 NPU IP appeared first on New Hor...
May 8, 2023
If you are planning on traveling to Turkey in the not-so-distant future, then I have a favor to ask....

featured video

Automate PCB P&R Tasks for Designs in Minutes

Sponsored by Cadence Design Systems

Discover how to get a dramatic reduction in design turnaround time by automating your placement, power plane generation, and critical net routing with Cadence® Allegro® X AI technology. Built on and accessed through the Allegro X Design Platform, Allegro X AI reduces P&R tasks from days to minutes with equivalent or higher quality compared with manually designed boards.

Click here for more information

featured contest

Join the AI Generated Open-Source Silicon Design Challenge

Sponsored by Efabless

Get your AI-generated design manufactured ($9,750 value)! Enter the E-fabless open-source silicon design challenge. Use generative AI to create Verilog from natural language prompts, then implement your design using the Efabless chipIgnite platform - including an SoC template (Caravel) providing rapid chip-level integration, and an open-source RTL-to-GDS digital design flow (OpenLane). The winner gets their design manufactured by eFabless. Hurry, though - deadline is June 2!

Click here to enter!

featured chalk talk

Bluetooth LE Audio
Bluetooth LE Audio is a prominent component in audio innovation today. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Finn Boetius from Nordic Semiconductor and Amelia Dalton discuss the what, where, and how of Bluetooth LE audio. They take a closer look at Bluetooth LE audio profiles, the architecture of Bluetooth LE audio and how you can get started using Bluetooth LE audio in your next design.
Jan 3, 2023
19,872 views