Texas Instruments enables “Haptics for Everyone”

11th December 2013

Nat Bowers

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Datasheet

With the new MSP430TCH5E haptics-enabled microcontrollers, Texas Instruments is expanding its capacitive touch solutions portfolio. The industry’s most flexible haptics and capacitive touch combo solution on one chip, engineers can use the MSP430TCH5E to add vibrational feedback to all capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels on mobile computing and gaming devices, smart TV remotes, cameras, printers, industrial control panels, point-of-sale terminals and toys.

The new MSP430TCH5E MCUs are supplied with an Immersion TouchSense 2200 software license, enabling developers to easily add and tune 122 different haptics effects, including effect chaining and audio-to-haptics functionalities. By collaborating with Immersion, TI has provided the industry’s leading haptic technology as an object code that can be integrated with other applications like capacitive touch.

Developers can further configure the MCUs with TI’s open source MSP430 Capacitive Touch Software Library. Featuring user-configurable ranging, recording and printing options, the new PC-based MSP430 Capacitive Touch Pro graphical user interface tool can also be used for the real-time evaluation, diagnosis and tuning of capacitive touch button, slider and wheel designs. With access to HAPTOUCH software development kit for custom HMI development, the MSP430TCH5E microcontroller also supports both Linear Resonant Actuators and Eccentric Rotating Machine actuators for increased haptic design flexibility.

Concurrent to the MSP430TCH5E MCU launch, Element14 has introduced the HapTouch BoosterPack to help developers quickly add haptics to their designs. The HapTouch BoosterPack combines MSP430TCH5E haptics MCUs and TI’s DRV2603 haptic driver into a familiar game controller form factor which can be plugged into TI’s MSP430 Value Line LaunchPad evaluation kit to demonstrate the ease of configuring capacitive touch buttons that provide audio-to-haptics feedback.Available now from Element14, this BoosterPack is ideal for a wide range of professional engineering, hobbyist and university projects.

Supplied in 28-Pin TSSOP and 32-Pin QFN packages, the new MSP430TCH5E MCUs are available immediately for $1.25 (USD) each in 1,000 unit quantities. The HapTouch BoosterPack is available exclusively from Element14 for $25.00 (USD).