Multi-touch pad controller
AssigneeBeBop Sensors, Inc.
InventorsKeith A. McMillen, Daniel Eric McAnulty
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A highly configurable controller is described that includes a number of different types of control mechanisms that emulate a wide variety of conventional control mechanisms using pressure and location sensitive sensors that generate high-density control information which may be mapped to the controls of a wide variety of devices and software.
Claims33
A sensor system for sensing touch events on a surface associated with the sensor system, comprising:
- piezoresistive fabric;
- a plurality of pairs of conductive traces arranged in an array, each pair of conductive traces being adjacent a portion of the piezoresistive fabric and configured to generate a sensor signal in conjunction with the corresponding portion of the piezoresistive fabric in response to a corresponding drive signal applied via one of the conductive traces in the pair of conductive traces and one or more of the touch events on the surface of the sensor system near the pair of conductive traces;
- and
- sensor circuitry configured to provide the drive signals selectively to the pairs of conductive traces, to receive the corresponding sensor signals, and to generate control information from the sensor signals, the control information representing a location and a force for each of the touch events relative to the surface of the sensor system, wherein the sensor circuitry is configured to generate the control information representing the location of each of the touch events with a positional resolution greater than the number of the pairs of conductive traces in the array.
A method for generating control information representing touch events on a surface associated with a sensor system, the sensor comprising a plurality of pairs of conductive traces arranged in an array, the method comprising:
- receiving a plurality of sensor signals, each sensor signal representing interaction of a piezoresistive fabric and a corresponding one of the pairs of conductive traces resulting from one or more of the touch events;
- digitizing the sensor signals;
- and
- generating the control information from the digitized sensor signals, the control information representing a location and a force for each of the touch events relative to the surface of the sensor system, the location of each of the touch events being represented by the control information with a positional resolution greater than the number of the pairs of conductive traces in the array.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.