An amazing electronic toy

It's probably got capacitance sensors under the plastic.

Putting a conductive element - like a finger - close to a pair of sensor wires - where "close" is defined in terms of the spacing between the wires - increase the capacitance between the wires.

And AC-excited capacitance bridge can be driven out of balance by the adjacent finger. It sounds complicated, but a microprocessor could handle it without much extra circuitry.

I recently picked up a Cypress dev board (~$20 at Digikey) with pads etched on the PCB. The default software lights a pad's LED every time you run your finger over it - and the pads are under

The selectivity is quite good; they include a 'slider' of irregularly-shaped PCB pads less than a millimeter apart, and the LED's light up one by one as you slide your finger back and forth.

I recall some flavors of PIC controllers have capacitive sense modules as well.

IIRC, each pad (think small capacitor) is fed voltage thru an internal R, and a timer measures the time to reach a particular voltage (triggering a comparator, stopping the timer). Discharge, rinse, repeat.

Your finger adds capacitance as it nears the pad. If the timer value rises significantly from normal values, the pad is considered 'pressed'.

The movable head and four legs for walking, turning, and backing up are more impressive. Hey TubeGuy, do you have a link?

Try this, it might be what he means:

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$69USD retail...

John :-#)#

When I was a boy (1980s) I had a teddy bear called Bingo Bear, I believe one of the first "talking toys" (besides stuff like the Speak & Spell learning game from Texas Instruments) that was all solid-state. It also had touch sensors "Rub my belly!" but they were electromechanical and clunky and tended to wear out. :(

IIRC they sold a couple "expansion packs" for the toy which included a new outfit plus a user-insertable EEPROM to give the toy new dialog appropriate to it like e.g. a doctor's outfit and cowboy outfit "Hey, pardner!"

Wish I knew what happened to it. WHERE IS MY BINGO BEAR??

Ah here it is:

This commercial is sort of creepy, actually...

It might be this:

Ed

I don't make toys, but do use this technique in one of our products. Atmel (now Microchip) makes a very easy to use line of touch sensors. I use the AT42QT line of chips: ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Atmel-9570-AT42-QTouch-BSW-AT42QT1110-Automotive_Datasheet.pdf

These are under $2 US, even the 11-channel ones.

These work even through thick plastic (I use them through up to 4mm thick polyurethane). They work even better through glass. The user can even wear rubber gloves and still reliably actuate the controls just by touching.

Still nothing special functionally, though. We already have voice activation in many of these toys; the next leap forward will be *thought* activated functionality. Still down the pike for now, though - at a marketable price anyway.

And the people silly enough to want it aren't going to be able to think clearly enough to get it to work.

So you'll be sticking with the voice-activation model I suppose lol