C H A P T E R  12

Touch Screens

You are now going to take a look at a cool gadget that you can use easily with an Arduino—a touch screen. Since the advent of smart phones and handheld game consoles, touch screens are now inexpensive and readily available. A touch screen allows you to make an easy touch interface for a device or it can be overlaid onto an LCD screen to give a touch interface. Companies such as Sparkfun make it easy to interface with these devices by providing connectors and breakout units. A breakout unit allows you to take what would normally be a tiny set of connectors or a non-standard connector and “break it out” to something more user-friendly, such as some header pins that you can use to push the unit into a breadboard. In this project, you’re going to use the readily available Nintendo DS touch screen with a breakout unit from Sparkfun. You’ll start off with a simple project that shows how to obtain readings from the touch screen before putting it to use.