RoadTest: CapSense MBR3 Evaluation Kit
Author: Nitin_Bhaskar
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?:
What were the biggest problems encountered?: Nothing in particular
Detailed Review:
I have not used any capacitive touch system earlier, but my experience with capsense MBR3 was quite good. The package in which I received was damaged but nothing bad had happened to the capsense MBR3 board. The capsense MBR3 board is well designed to demo the capability of Capsense MBR3. Arduino compatibility is the best part!!! The Box contained following things,
The software support for this product is quite good. EZ-Click software provides easy exploring options to the user. It comes with few examples, LED toggle, Proximity and water tolerance. The interface provided by the software is self explanatory, plus a very good user manual is available from Cypress website. The PC interface to the MBR3 is via P5LP as USB to I2C Bridge. The generate config file option available in EZ-Click tool generates a .h file containing the configuration done in EZ-Click software. This tool also helps in monitoring the proximity sensor and MBR3 capacitive buttons realtime as shown in below images.
The impressive feature of Capsense MBR3 is the SmartSense auto tuning feature. After changing the Trace length on BTN4 or Capacitance change on BTN2, it's matter of a reset cycle and the system detects the button press effectively. However the water tolerance example didn't work efficiently. Sometimes a very small distance between button and finger was detected as a touch. Below image is an example.
The Raspberry pi and Arduino examples provided worked very well. My idea is to use this product with beaglebone black for my project idea(which i intend to publish after completion of the project).
Overall Capsense MBR3 is a very good product with SmartSense auto tuning feature followed with very good software support 
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