The Pi Cap is an add-on board that adds precise capacitive touch, distance sensing and high quality audio functions and is designed for use with the Raspberry Pi A+, B+ 2 and 3 (and any Raspberry Pi with a 40-pin GPIO connector).
Using the Pi Cap it is very quick and simple to connect a Raspberry Pi to the physical world. The board has 12 capacitive sensing electrodes that can have anything conductive connected to them, including wire, foil strips, copper track, conductive paint, conductive material, crocodile clips, etc. It is then a simple matter to control sounds, videos and more.
To connect to the Raspberry Pi a 40-pin GPIO connector header is provided, with seven of the pins broken out for use as desired. There is an 84 pad (7 x 12) prototyping area with 2.54mm pitch and the 7x GPIO pins broken out from the connector header. This makes it easy to connect additional sensors or buttons for more advanced projects. A multifunction push button is provided that can be configured to safely shutting down or restarting the Pi.
The audio output of the board is high quality 15.5-bit stereo and the audio circuitry has its own dedicated low-noise PSU. There is a 3.5mm stereo jack for connection and the audio signal is powerful enough to drive headphones. The Pi Cap has a user programmable RGB LED that is precisely colour balanced and the design of the board means that the LED is visible when mounted on a Raspberry Pi.
The software required for the Pi Cap is contained in the official Raspbian repository, so setting-up and starting is easy and updates to software are easy to obtain. To further make project development with the Pi Cap easy, fully featured powerful Python, C++ and Node.js libraries are available so that sensors may be included.
For those users who are looking to develop projects in such areas as robotics, IoT, wearables, interactive toys, etc. the Bare Conductive Pi Cap is an essential purchase.
