DIY capacitive touchpad

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member svofski made this rather sweet touch-sensitive keypad with backlighting –

This a custom implementation of capacitive sensing technlogy as per QMatrix Whitepaper. It uses an ATmega8 to scan the keys and outputs ASCII characters to the serial port.

Schematic, PCB, and source code are available, though the project page is currently Russian-only. Check out the Googlish interpretation for details.

Update: As the pointed out in the comments, Google’s Russian is a little rusty. For further explanation, best to check out the tech whitepaper.