Accessories
A DIY Stylus for Capacitive Screens
Collin Cunningham shows how to create a DIY stylus for those capacitive touch screen devices we all know and love. It looks pretty simple if you’ve got some conductive foam at your disposal.
Collin Cunningham shows how to create a DIY stylus for those capacitive touch screen devices we all know and love. It looks pretty simple if you’ve got some conductive foam at your disposal.
Mickey Segal
05/05/2010 at 2:13 pm
Nice proof of concept, but a custom built version with a more durable small tip and a conductive barrel with no exposed wires would be better.
Since Apple has announced opposition to pens, having pen attachment sites would be a good way for other tablets to offer an advantage. Pens do wonders for the screen size to pen width ratio, and people are better at fine gestures with a pen than they are with a finger.
The pen is mightier than the finger (except for multitouch, where numbers count).
Nameless
05/05/2010 at 6:28 pm
If Apple’s so opposed to the pen/stylus, how come they use them to take signatures at Apple Stores when someone makes a purchase?
Anyway, this is an interesting approach to a DIY capacitive stylus. I didn’t think of making one like that since I thought I had no conductive foam, but now that I think about it, I might have some.
Instead, what I did was take a long, torn strip of anti-static bag material, and taped it onto a marker with a felt chisel tip that was all dried out. Trimmed the tip a bit, and it worked fairly well on the iPad, though I got a bit of a rude awakening when it didn’t work on certain Android smartphones.
(Doesn’t do a thing about the complete lack of palm rejection, though. I wonder what insulating gloves people get and just cut off the thumb, index finger, and middle finger for explicitly that purpose.)