TakkTile – Tactile sensors using MEMS barometers

Takktile Thumb

TakkTile.

The First Tactile Arrays that Are:
• Inexpensive
• Robust
• Sensitive
• Easy to Build
• Easy to Interface
• Adaptable

The Approach
• Mount barometer sensor chips on standard printed circuit boards
• Cover with Rubber
• Interface with I2C bus or USB

Tactile sensors using MEMS barometers – Novel http://biorobotics.harvard.edu/tactile/


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4 Comments

  1. Jaap van Wingerde

    The link gives an error 403: “Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /tactile/ on this server.”

  2. The working link is http://www.takktile.com/ . Don’t know why they maintain a separate webspace, but there you go.

    While the rubber filling process is pretty cool, and I’m happy to see just how cheap pressure sensors are getting these days, I’m just not sure why I’d use this over a touch panel or something cheaper. Sacrificing spatial resolution for higher sensitivity to pressure doesn’t seem like a worthwhile tradeoff for most projects, and at $250 for the prototype, I’m not going to buy it to find out where it’s usefulness lies.

    For those who do want to buy the board though, you can get it here: https://secure.nonolithlabs.com/store/tactile

  3. @Scott – TakkTile’s designed for robotic manipulation, where using a traditional touch panel (resistive or capacitative) is of little use.

    TakkTile’s all opensource, on github none the less! Check out the CAD, firmware, and host code at http://github.com/takktile. As we move from prototyping to production, the price will fall, it just remains to be seen by how much. When running a business, you can always drop the price, but seldom raise it. 🙂

  4. Ah, got it. Watching the video, then seeing the Dorabot project put it into much better context for me. Robotics isn’t really my field, but I would expect accurate touch sensing like this is normally much more expensive. If the rubber were more thermally conductive, you could use the built-in temperature sensor to get thermal data too. I imagine sourcing a good cheap material for that is somewhat hard though…either way, cool project!

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