The first thing to discuss about the Bare Conductive Touch Board Starter Kit has to be its price. At just a shade below £100 in the UK and $150 in the US, it’s certainly no impulse buy for the maker on a budget. At the same time, though, it’s hard to call it bad value for money when you see the care and attention that has gone into its creation.
The full article can be found in The MagPi 41
The box, a sizeable affair that has no hope of slipping through a letter box while you’re out, contains an impressive selection of parts. The highlight, naturally, is the Touch Board itself, which is joined by a generous pot of conductive paint with a thick brush, a tube of the same paint with a fine-tipped nozzle for more precise application, a self-powered rechargeable speaker, USB cables, a microSD card reader, and banana clip cables. This is in addition to a rolled-up stencil set (about which more later) and an impressive, oversize, full-colour guidebook covering the kit’s three primary projects.
The guidebook is far from an afterthought, but it’s hardly required to get started. The packaging of the Touch Board itself, a box within a box, doubles as a quickstart guide and reveals a very clever feature: pre-recorded instructional messages already loaded onto the bundled 128MB microSD card.
The Touch Board, for those unfamiliar, is an Arduino-compatible device designed to make working with conductive paint, thread, and even Play-Doh as simple as possible. It arrives preconfigured to play MP3 files from the SD card each time one of its 12 electrode inputs is touched. This is then used to drive the user’s introduction: connect the micro-USB cable and the bundled speaker or a pair of headphones, touch input E0 with your finger, and you’ll hear a congratulatory message; press E1 and you’ll learn about the board’s inputs. This process continues through to E11, which sends you off to the Bare Conductive website to learn more.
With the Starter Kit, though, you have offline support too. The aforementioned guidebook does a fantastic job of walking you through three example projects in a step-by-step fashion. With full-colour pictures at every step, it’s hard to get lost or confused.
The first suggested project is the biggest: learning how to make graphical sensors. This involves the rolled-up stencil and overlays, which come with handy sticky tabs. Attach the stencil to a wall - or, if you’re not sure about the somewhat permanent nature of the paint becoming a fixture of your house, a large sheet of paper or card - and brush on the paint. Decorate with the coloured overlays, use the thinner paint tube to draw wires leading to the Touch Board, copy the MP3s to the microSD, and voila: an interactive house.
The remaining two projects are variations on a theme. The first adds touch-sensitivity to everyday objects, such as a pill bottle which reminds you of dosages, or a photo frame that describes its own scene. The final project has you brushing the paint onto the floor to create an intruder alarm, albeit one which only works if said intruder is barefoot.
The three projects detail some, but not all, of the Touch Board’s capabilities. A page of extended projects at the back of the guidebook points you towards the website to learn about the board’s more advanced capabilities, such as reprogramming it to operate as a non-contact distance sensor or a Makey Makey-style musical instrument.
At this point, the Touch Board is likely to have entranced children but potentially turned more advanced hobbyists off. Towards the back of the guide, it’s revealed that the Touch Board is more powerful than it would first appear: it’s a fully functional Arduino, compatible with various Shields and add-ons to provide everything from Bluetooth connectivity to motor control.
A glance at the board itself reveals the familiar Arduino headers, albeit without pins, with full access to these for more advanced creations. This, combined with an Atmel ATmega microcontroller, gives the board the ability to do anything an Arduino can do, including interfacing with external hardware, such as motors, servos, sensors, or even the Raspberry Pi itself. Combined with the flexibility of Bare Conductive’s clever paint, this gives the kit considerable legs when the three bundled projects are finished.
Last word
5/5
It’s not cheap, but for anyone looking to get started with conductive paint or touch-based projects, this kit is easy to recommend and very well put together, with considerable attention to detail.
