Texas Instruments has announced the release of a new MSP430TCH5E haptics-enabled microcontrollers.
The microcontrollers allow any developer to “add vibrational feedback to all capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels on mobile computing and gaming devices, smart TV remotes, cameras, printers, industrial control panels, point-of-sale terminals and toys.”
In others, it’s haptics for Joe Developer.
According to the release announcement, the new microcontrollers:
…Can be further configured with TI’s open source MSP430™ Capacitive Touch Software Library. Developers can also leverage the new PC-based MSP430 Capacitive Touch Pro graphical user interface (GUI) tool to evaluate, diagnose and tune capacitive touch button, slider and wheel designs in real time. It features user-configurable ranging, recording and printing options.
To help developers quickly add haptics to their designs, Element14 has created the HapTouch™ BoosterPack that combines MSP430TCH5E haptics MCUs and TI’s DRV2603 haptic driver into a familiar game controller form factor. The new BoosterPack can be plugged into TI’s MSP430 Value Line LaunchPad evaluation kit to demonstrate the ease of configuring capacitive touch buttons that provide audio-to-haptics feedback. The new BoosterPack is ideal for a wide range of professional engineering, hobbyist and university projects and is available immediately from Element14. A fully programmable software development kit (SDK) is also provided.
The complete release announcement, including ordering information, are available here.
