Touch Pad (4-Wire Resistive Touch Pad)

Touch Pad is latest new range of inexpensive high solution in user interface technology now-a-days. It is very useful peripheral to provide excellent versatility for working in many different applications. Touch Pad is ideal as the switching of your robot or for the switching of your monitoring systems. Give degree of freeness and save money, by simply interfacing with controller boards. A touch pad (also track pad) is a pointing device consisting of specialized surface that can translate the motion and position of a user's fingers to a relative position on screen.

TOUCH SENSOR: A touch screen sensor is a clear glass panel with a touch responsive surface which is placed over a display screen so that the responsive area of the panel covers the viewable area of the display screen. The sensor generally has an electrical current or signal going through it and touching the screen causes a voltage or signal change. This voltage change is used to determine the location of the touch to the screen or any possible conversions. There are several types of touch pads are available. Resistive touch pads are best suitable one. They are also available in many types like 4-wire or 5-wire Resistive touch pads. Fig-8 4Wire Touch Pad RESISTIVE TOUCH SCREEN: 1. Polyester Film. 2. Top Resistive Layer. 3. Conductive Transparent Metal Coating. 4. Bottom Resistive Layer. 5. Insulating Dots. 6. Glass Substrate. Fig-9 Layers of Resistive Touch Pad

Resistive touch screen monitor is composed of a flexible top layer and a rigid bottom layer separated by insulating dots, attached to a touch screen controller. The inside surface of each of the two layers is coated with a transparent metal oxide coating. Pressing the flexible top sheet creates electrical contact between the resistive layers, producing a switch closing in the circuit. The controller gets the alternating voltages between the two layers and converts them into the digital X and Y coordinates of the activated area. It has touch efficiency of up to 70%, may be damage by sharp objects, dust and water resistant.

4-WIRE RESISTIVE TOUCH PAD: A four-wire resistive touch screen is a sensor consisting of two transparent resistive plates, ideally of uniform resistivity, normally separated by insulating spacers. The metalized contacts of the x layer run along the y-direction and thus the resistance is measured between the two x-direction ends. Similarly, the y layer has metalized contacts that run in the x-direction so that the resistance is measured along the y-axis.

Fig-10 Structure of 4-Wire resistive touch pad When touched with sufficient pressure, the top plate deforms making contact with the bottom plate. At the point of contact, the bottom layer effectively divides the top layer into two resistors in series, in a manner similar to the way the wiper on a potentiometer divides the potentiometer into two series resistors. Similarly, the bottom layer is effectively divided into two resistors at the point of contact with the top layer. Each plate is analogous to the two ends of a potentiometer where the other plate serves as the wiper

. Fig-11 Resistive dividers formed by a touching a screen (4-wire)

The biasing and measurement requirements for each of the four wires of the touch pad are summarized in following table.

Table-1 Touch Pad interface requirements Both the X- and Y- pins have a requirement to be either open or connected to Vss, as shown in Table. A classic open drain output structure meets this requirement. Both the X+ and Y+ pins have a requirement to be either a voltage source or a voltage measurement point. A voltage source can be achieved by having a pin function as an out port with a sufficient current sourcing capability. Voltage measurement can be accomplished with an ADC. Thus the X+ and Y+ signals need to be connected to pins of the MCU that have both the current sourcing logic one and ADC capability. Additionally, the X+ signal needs to be connected to a pin that has a digital input with a moderately high pull-up resistor if hardware touch detection is required.

CONTROLLER: The controller is small Mother Board that connects between the touch pad and the PC. It takes information from the touch sensor and translates it into information that PC can understand. One has to interface device through some graphical user interface (GUI) language like Visual Basic (VB 6.0).

Fig-12 Setup diagram of PC and Touch Pad interface

The setup for computer control is as shown in fig no. 10. Connections are as follow; Connect normal DB-9 serial connector into computer and 3-pin connector to the UART connector of Mother Board. Take 4-Wire Resistive connector and connect to the ADC port i.e. Port A0 Port A3.

Table-2 Touch Pad interface with Mother Board