Possible to "Invert" the Touch Sensor (start from zero)

ESPHome
1

Is it poss to set up a touch sensor but then use it in an inverted state so it starts at zero then acts as some sort of pressure sensor counting up?

Bit if a vague description…

2

What component are you talking about, and what sort of pressures are you referring to? Finger press? A truck rolling over it? A fly landing?

3

The touch sensor works by detecting changes in the stray capacitance of the touch plate to ground. This depends on a lot of things, like the area of the pad, the area of the thing touching the pad, the permittivity of the thing the size of the thing, etc…

There may be a small linear region for each thing that depends on contact pressure as the thing spreads out on the plate under more pressure. It will have a very limited dynamic range and be far to noisy / non-repeatable to be useful for any sort of pressure sensor that is not binary (on / off) though.

So in short, “no”.

1 Like
4

Thanks, Tom.

I’ll look more into a physical switch rather than touch.

5

A switch is going to be on or off. How will that be a pressure sensor?

6

Yeah, sorry, the topic is very vague.

I have a touch sensor now, and only use it for “if below X … turn off”

I basically wanted to invert that touch sensor to start from zero, so, if it ever went 1 or greater, the state would be ON… without having to remove the touch fully and replace with a switch.