Tom Perme
Microchip Technology

This application note describes various ways of detecting button presses using capacitive sensing. Some capacitive sensing solutions on the market offer only a "black box" approach to capacitive sensing, in which an IC is purchased and it signals button presses with limited configurability. Microchip's capacitive sensing solution offers more flexibility because the software routines to detect a button press can be completely user-written. This is not to say the user must develop their own software routines, as Microchip provides capacitive sensing routines which may be used to get started immediately with your capacitive sensing solution.