Last month I discussed Rachael Moat’s musical bowls that I saw at Manchester MakeFest – conductive audio-playing magic that helps children with special educational needs to broaden their dietary horizons – and promised that I’d be reviewing the hardware that made it happen. Here, then, is that review, of the Bare Conductive Touch Board Starter Kit.
Bare Conductive got its start with a clever formulation for conductive paint. The concept isn’t new – small pens of silver liquid have long been used to fix electrical breaks in heated car windscreens, while scribbling graphite pencil onto card to conduct electricity is a common school experiment. However, the company’s primary products – a pen-type squeezy tube and a larger pot for brush application, have proven effective and popular in the maker market.
The follow-up was the Touch Board, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller built specifically for touch sensing. Combining several features it would normally take additional boards to achieve, the Touch Board offers 11 large contact points for connection to conductive thread, the company’s conductive paint, wires or the tip of your finger.
When a touch is sensed, the board fires off one of the MP3 files stored on a bundled micro-SD card through a 3.5mm headphone jack. If that’s all you want to do, there’s no more programming involved – just build your circuit and replace the MP3 files with your desired sounds. Otherwise, fire up the Arduino IDE and start hacking; all the usual pins and features are present and correct on the board, as well as the touch-sensitive and music-playing functions.
The Starter Kit is really a showcase, bundling all the company’s products together in one terribly well-thought-out pack. Inside the oversized box, you’ll find a pot of conductive paint and a brush for wide-area application, a squeezy tube of the same material for finer control, the Touch Board, a micro-SD card, a micro-SD reader, colourful wires with crocodile clips, a rechargeable amplified speaker and – oddly – a stencil of a house and a pair of shaped paper cut-outs.
The latter forms the first project of a bundled three-project, full-colour guidebook. Wonderfully designed, the guidebook walks a newcomer through the setup process and uses the stencil and paper cut-outs, along with bundled sticky tabs and Velcro, to demonstrate one use of conductive paint: a diagram of a house, mounted directly to a wall, which fires off sound effects when particular objects are touched.
The remaining two projects are in a similar vein; the second demonstrates how the Touch Board can trigger playback when objects such as a houseplant or photo frame are touched, while the last creates a sort of burglar alarm – albeit one that’s only likely to operate if the thief is barefoot, a problem neatly circumvented in the picture demonstration with the use of a dog instead.
The most impressive aspect for a newcomer, though, is that the Touch Board itself acts as an introductory guide. You simply connect it to micro-USB to hook up the power and speaker (or a headphone) and then press the first touch contact point to hear a welcoming message. It then talks the listener through the features and use of the board – a really neat touch, and one that helps to humanise the otherwise scary magic tech that could put off non-technical types.
That isn’t to say that the Touch Board is only suited to newbies though: at its heart, it’s a fully fledged Arduino system and you’re able to reprogram it as you see fit. If you’d rather trigger external hardware when touch is detected, the usual analogue and digital pins are present and correct as a foundation on which you can build; it’s even possible to program the board as a non-contact distance sensor if you’d prefer.
You aren’t limited to using just the paint either: any conductive material, including conductive thread, works just fine with the Touch Board, as does the fruit more commonly associated with the rival Makey Makey board. It’s even possible to use a subset of Arduino Shield add-ons to further extend your projects, and there’s a guide to what does and doesn’t work in the back of the bundled book.
The only real reason for not picking up the Touch Board Starter Kit is the price. At £95 inc VAT, it’s above the cost of an impulse buy for most hobbyists, but it’s also hard to say how the cost could easily be reduced: the Touch Board alone costs £55, while the conductive paint adds a further £24 to the mix – and that doesn’t leave a great deal for the speaker, card reader, cables, brush, stencil and fullcolour booklet.
If you’re looking to get kids involved in electronics, it’s a great kit, and the paint is easily washable with soap and water for the inevitable mess they’ll make.
However, for anyone merely curious about the potential of conductive paint, pairing a £6 tube of Bare Conductive’s finest with a cheap Arduino Uno or clone will prove a more affordable introduction.
The Bare Conductive Touch Board Starter Kit is available now for £95 inc VAT from www.bareconductive.com