All- New Grove – 12-Channel Capacitive Touch Keypad on #newproductsTuesday

Hey Seeekers,

It’s newproductsTuesday! This week we are excited to bring you the all-new Grove – 12-Key Capacitive Keypad (ATtiny1616).

The Grove 12-Channel Capacitive Touch Keypad is based on the ATtiny1616 by Microchip. It is an AVR 8-bit processor running at up to 16 MHz. ATtiny1616 is a low-power, high-performance chip integrated QTouch peripheral touch controller which supports capacitive touch interfaces with proximity sensing and driven shield. With this module, you can easily create an Arduino password keypad or a DIY phone keypad. Isn’t it so cool?

In the past, we have released two other different sensor modules also based on the principle of capacitive touch. They are the Grove – Capacitive Touch Slider Sensor (CY8C4014LQI) and the Grove – 12 Key Capacitive I2C Touch Sensor V2 (MPR121). Both of these communicate via I2C just like our new Capacitive Touch Keypad.

We made the Grove – 12-Channel Capacitive keypad into a 3×4 form, just like the layout of a mobile phone keyboard. The traditional keypad requires 3 vertical lines and 4 horizontal lines to scan, which will occupy 7 I/O pins of the microcontroller. With the help of ATtiny1616 and Grove connector, only RX and TX two pins are enough for Grove – 12-Channel Capacitive Touch Keypad. You can easily use this module with a microcontroller with a hardware UART interface, or you can use the software UART to read the button input with two normal I/O pins.

Here is a pinout diagram of this module:

All in all, the Grove – 12-Channel Capacitive Touch Keypad is an easy-to-use module that requires very little coding, especially when you use it with Grove compatible mainboards, no soldering, just plug and play.

So that is it for this week’s product release. Hope you all enjoyed! Stay tuned for more products that will be released in the future!

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