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WireTouch

WireTouch is an open multi-touch tracker based on mutual (projected) capacitance sensing. It was designed and built to foster research in the field of human-computer interaction. Please visit http://www.arminbwagner.com/wiretouch for demos and background information. You may also want to have a look at this paper:

DOI.

The authors are currently not working on further updates. Feel free to fork the project and extend it as you see fit.

WireTouch tracking software showing the interpolated measurements of a hand

Building

WireTouch Firmware

  1. The heart of the WireTouch hardware is an ATmega328P microcontroller equipped with an Arduino bootloader. To upload the WireTouch firmware, connect the mainboard with your computer. Use an USB to serial UART FTDI 5V cable.

  2. Open hardware/v1.3/firmware/firmware.ino in the Arduino IDE. Select Tools>Board>Arduino UNO and the correct port. Upload the Arduino sketch.

Please note: The patched FTDI driver is not working in the latest version of OS X. Please skip step 3 and just use the default (and unfortunately slower) standard Apple FTDI driver.

3. Install the virtual com port FTDI driver. You need to patch the FTDIUSBSerialDriver configuration to increase the symbol rate of the computer-mainboard connection (see FTDI Application Note 120). We prepared a little perl script for that. Run it as the superuser: sudo perl modify-ftdi-driver-settings.pl If you are running El Capitan (or a later Mac OS version) you will also have to deactivate the new system integrity protection (SIP) to make this work (see issue #1).

WireTouch Monitor

  1. Download openFrameworks 0.8.4.
  2. Download the following openFrameworks addons and put them into your openFrameworks addons directory:.
  1. Copy the wiretouch_monitor directory of this repository into your openFrameworks apps/myApps/ directory.
  2. We are currently using Xcode 7.3 on OSX 10.11.4 for development. Open the Xcode project. Build it.

Next to the openFrameworks addons we are also using several other 3rd-party libraries. You do not have to download them manually as they already reside inside the src/3rd-party directory (This list is just for future reference and to give credit).

License

WireTouch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

A few of the included 3rd-party libraries are licensed under the GPL-compatible MIT license.

WireTouch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.