Touch sensors are getting more and more popular these days especially since many low cost microcontroller have them built in. If you have a controller that doesn’t have built in touch sensors there are many chips that do just that. The Freescale MPR121 is one of these chips. This MPR121 Touch Sensor Controller Project will give you the pointers you need to get your feet wet with touch sensors.
“This board was pretty tough to design in Eagle. The touchpads and the traces to them have to be laid out just so or they won’t work well. The autorouter completely refused to do anything with this board no matter what I tried, so I ended up hand routing everything. And even that was very difficult. But in the end it was worth it. It looks great, and works just as well.”