TI introduces the industry's most flexible haptics and capacitive touch combo solution

DALLAS, USA: Texas Instruments announced the industry's most flexible haptics and capacitive touch combo solution on one chip. The new MSP430TCH5E haptics-enabled MCUs allow users 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.

Featuring a license for Immersion TouchSense 2200 software, MSP430TCH5E MCUs allow developers to easily add and tune 122 different haptics effects, including effect chaining and audio-to-haptics functionalities.

TI collaborated with Immersion to provide the industry's leading haptic technology as an object code that can be integrated with other applications like capacitive touch.

The new MSP430TCH5E MCUs can be further configured with TI's open source MSP430 capacitive touch software library. Developers can also leverage the new PC-based MSP430 capacitive touch pro GUI tool to evaluate, diagnose and tune capacitive touch button, slider and wheel designs in real time. It features user-configurable ranging, recording and printing options.

To help developers quickly add haptics to their designs, element14 has created the HapTouch BoosterPack that combines MSP430TCH5E haptics MCUs and TI's DRV2603 haptic driver into a familiar game controller form factor.

The new BoosterPack 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. The new BoosterPack is ideal for a wide range of professional engineering, hobbyist and university projects and is available immediately from Element14. A fully programmable SDK is also provided.

Features and benefits of TI's new flexible haptics technology:

* Includes a license to industry-leading Immersion TouchSense 2200 haptic software.

* More than 120 different haptic effects for various button, alert and gesturing effects.

* Access to HapTouch SDK for custom HMI development.

* Supports both LRA and ERM actuators for increased haptic design flexibility.

* Easy-to implement reference design available with TI's DRV2603 haptic driver.