Conductive paint has been used in a plethora of applications, and is by no means new to the electronics industry. However, Bare Conductive has recently swept the DIY community given their retargeting of conductive paint use cases and supporting users with intuitive hardware.
In addition to easy-to-use conductive paint, the arguable centerpiece of Bare Conductive is their development board, the Touch Board, which features a microcontroller that is dedicated to support capacitive touch and MP3 decoder functions. The entire purpose of the Touch Board is to support 12 capacitive touch electrodes that are exposed along the top edge, which can be allocated to recreate custom sounds, ideally using conductive paint. The board is similar to the Arduino Leonardo board and can be programmed using the Arduino IDE, making interacting with the board simple and intuitive.
The Touch Board
The Touch Board was designed with the intention to utilize conductive paint as the grounding conductor of the capacitive touch sensor onboard, which makes creating unique interactive displays, objects, and art installments easy. To support their unique product offering, Bare Conductive provides several kits to help users learn how to use and create their own capacitive touch applications.
Touch Board Starter Kit
The Touch Board Starter Kit is perfect for anyone, from extreme beginner or tinkerer, programming pro to engineer, or anything in between. This touch board gives you the capability to turn any conductive surface into a sensor, is extremely well documented, and provides source code for any conductive paint or Touch Board application.
Touch Board Pro Kit
As a step up in complexity from the Touch Board Starter Kit, Bare Conductive provides their users with the Touch Board Proto Shield, pre-printed paint sensors, copper tape for long distance sensing, and an in-depth guide to help you prototype your next project. This kit is intended for designers, engineers, and electronics hobbyists. Additionally, this kit allows users to create a MIDI controller, an MP3 player, a custom gaming interface, or whatever creative combination of capacitive touch sensors and Arduino ecosystem is fathomable.