Microchip speeds development of sophisticated graphical and touch-sensing human interface designs with 32-bit MCUs

CHANDLER, USA: Microchip Technology Inc. has announced two new development tools for adding advanced human interfaces to PIC32, 32-bit microcontroller-based designs.

The Multimedia Expansion Board enables development of highly interactive, graphics-based interfaces with network connectivity. The enhanced mTouch Cap Touch Evaluation Kit adds a new board for implementing capacitive touch sensing with the PIC32.

Consumer and industrial customers want products with easy-to-use graphic interfaces, touch-screen controls, high-quality audio prompts, capacitive touch buttons/sliders and wireless connectivity. The PIC32 microcontroller line has expanded to serve these market requirements, and the two new kits make it easy and cost effective for embedded designers to develop a broad range of consumer and industrial applications that require intuitive human interfaces.

“An increasing number of embedded applications require high-impact human interfaces,” said Sumit Mitra, vice president of Microchip’s High Performance Microcontroller Division. “These two new tools show developers just how easy it is to achieve great results with Microchip’s 32-bit PIC® microcontrollers.”

The Multimedia Expansion Board is a modular add-on to any PIC32 Starter Kit, which have been purchased by thousands of embedded designers. The board demonstrates how to implement a flexible graphics display strategy that is not dependent on controller-based QVGA Display Modules, which are frequently obsoleted.

It also includes a high-quality 24-bit stereo audio codec line out, headphone and microphone jacks, integrated FCC-certified Wi-Fi, an on-board 3-axis accelerometer and a 5-position joystick. No other manufacturer offers such a complete multimedia development system for this class of 32-bit microcontroller.

The enhanced mTouch Cap Touch Evaluation Kit includes a new board for development with the PIC32. It comes equipped with capacitive touch-sensing keys and sliders, which allows designers to evaluate this interface in their applications using the Windows OS-based mTouch Diagnostic Tool.

This software tool provides an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) for developing cap-touch buttons and sliders, and is included in the free MPLAB Integrated Development Environment. The additional software libraries, source code and other support materials that come with the board further shorten development cycles and reduce design costs.

When combined with its other included boards, the enhanced mTouch Cap Touch Evaluation Kit allows designers to evaluate all of Microchip’s 8-, 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers, providing a scalable capacitive touch sensing development platform for a wide range of design needs.

The Multimedia Expansion Board (part # DM320005, $249.99) and the enhanced mTouch Cap Touch Evaluation Kit (part # DM183026-2, $99.95) are both available today.