We wrote the firmware shown on the video bellow as away to verify the touch hardware for @Boldport. This is likely not going to be the final firmware they will ship with the kit but at the very least the project files will be freely available for anyone to use when the kit has been released.
We are in the process of expanding the original code to add some more fun feature that members of the boldport club will no doubt enjoy.
Touchy is @boldport kit number 7. This is an awesome development board for silabs EFM8SB10F8G which has builtin capacitance sensors. This kit is a great for anyone new to capacitance sensors specially with how Saar at Boldport implemented design. Its simple and focused on the two key features that this microcontroller was designed for and that is the low power capability couple with the touch capacitance.
The board has been pre-loaded with a serial bootloader which means that anyone wanting to experiment with this type of micro doesn’t have to go the distance by buying the a programmer/debugger. Saying that, if you are want or already have a compatible programmer then this kit does allow to use it because all the pins are already expanded out to a standard 2.54mm pin header.
In this video @opticalworm run through the functionality of the test firmware for the Touchy kit by Boldport.
https://github.com/HashDefineElectronics/BC_Touchy_Firmware
the project files were develop using Silabs Simplicity studio which is a variant of eclipse that uses Arm keil C51 compiler.
HEX
This is where the compiled version of the projects are stored. These are purely for convenience so that anyone wanting to avoid installing and compiling the project source.
Simple
As the name suggest, this is a simple project to for test the basic functionality of the Touchy board. It uses Silabs CapsenseCircleSlider example project as its template. Touchy board.
This project uses Silabs Simplicity studio.
The great news is that the Touch board has its debugger ports routed out to the 2.54mm pins headers. However, the board does have a bootloader already programmed so if you have no intention to spend money on a debugger you have the choice of not using a debugger.
That said, if you are planning on doing some heavy development on the touchy board or even on the EFM8SBS1 cores then here are a couple of debugger that you can use.
Here’s the video of Ronald (@opticalworm) running through the process of uploading firmware on to the Touchy board via its serial bootloader.
Comments or questions are welcome.
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