Customer References & Articles

Customer Reference Project in the field of communication systems

Press Articles
Company

For over 20 years, Jotron Phontech has offered an extensive and flexible range of audio products which have been carefully designed and built for harsh maritime environments. Their systems are in use worldwide on merchant ships, fishing vessels, tug boats, offshore supply vessels, as well as various navy ships and offshore oil and gas installations.

Position

"We needed a reliable solution for our ship telephones, so we looked for a touch sensor design. Now that Altium Designer, together with Atmel QTouch Studio, offers an integrated solution, we expect to reduce our PCB design time by up to 80%."
Atle M. Christiansen, R&D Manager
Jotron Phontech AS

Project: Access Panel for PA system,  Designer: Anton Søberg

Step 1

"I've finally downloaded the Altium Designer Beta 10 and have been using it for one day. Since did some schematic capturing in version Summer 09 of Altium Designer beforehand, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to import the design in the current version, but everything went smoothly and especially the QTouch Designer part was great!

All the sensors were created based on my specification in under 1 minute (I'm not kidding here!).
Elektronikk 05-2010

Touch Technology:
The Norwegian Connection
Article about Atmel, Altium
and the user Jotron Phontec
>> Download article

Screen shots of the PCB design:

The process was really streamlined, I knew my front panel thickness and how large the buttons were supposed to be. So I just punched in the numbers, updated the PCB and all the sensors were there, just as specified.

In order to get enough "fingers" in the sensor for achieving highest area between the electrodes and hence the coupling between the sensor fingers, I had to adjust the width and height parameters. I quickly changed the H/W ratio parameters in the PCB and synchronized back to the schematic. Some final questions were successfully answered by Altium’s support team.

So far it looks that I've spent only day and a half on going from an idea of how the board should look and to a ready design. Now I am ready to order a prototype board which I will probably get back in 10 days.
EL-Info 06-2010

Article in German about
Touch Technology
"Daten aus einem Guss
Touch Sensoren entwerfen
mit einheitlichem Datenmodell"

>> Download the article
Step 2

"I managed to get some shots of the prototype access panel (they are in isometric view) and a view of the touch panel interface with superimposed polycarbonate sheet with silkscreen. I've also received the adhesive sheet from 3M (the one that Atmel used in their QT600 kit as bonding agent between the pcb and front panel) and the polycarbonate front panel was ordered as well."



Step 3

"I´ve received a reply from the experts at Atmel who took a look at my PCB layout. They told me that the design was well-planned and shows a good implementation. However, they thought that I had a floating copper on the internal layers (they didn´t know that Altium sets internal layers as negative, i.e copper area on internal layers is actually copper-free) so this was actually a misunderstanding on how Altium handles internal layers. So, I'm quite happy, that they didn't find any errors and thought that the design was good."

 


Step 4

"The PCB will be ready in a couple of hours, I just have to place all the components on the pcb and stick into an oven.
I now have time to start writing a test-driver to test the Qtouch part. I would normally use the Nanoboard that I have here, but unfortunately it does not have any spare I2C lines available on the headers*, so I have to use microcontroller board instead."


* Comment of Altium: Indeed the Nanoboard does not have an integrated I2C connection. However, you can realize the I2C interface by using the User Headers with two 10K Ohm pull-up resistors. Furthermore, with the PB30 Prototyping Peripheral Board that provides a rapid prototyping space with pre-defined land areas, you can quickly add additional hardware resource, e.g. an I2C connector. This will be demonstrated later when the NanoBoard is used to write a QTouch driver for debug purposes, for the fine-tuning of the QTouch sensitivity and as a general development platform for future QTouch applications.


Step 5

"The boards have arrived! So I immediately went to the lab and started distributing solder-paste across the pads, just an hour later the last component was placed and the pcb was placed into the oven. Time to do some baking! When the board  was done my colleague Hans Olav to take a quick look at  it and did some quick re-work on some solder links and I was ready to test the prototype. It is always a bit scary to apply voltage to the board for the first time, because there is a little voice in your head saying: “This is going to blow up right into your face!” or as my colleague Bjørn says: "This is gonna end up in tears" :) Well, everything went fine, no explosions, no smoke and no tears.

 

Step 6

Without having a driver for the QTouch controller it became hard to trim the values for touch sensitivity. So I started to create my own driver. Any basic driver for any circuit should have at least two low-level functions, one to write a specific amount of data to a specific register on a device and another one to read data from a specific register.

Writing data to a device was plain and simple: transmit the device address followed by a write operation bit, wait for the acknowledge bit from slave, transmit the register address and write the data, followed by a stop condition. The problem appeared when attempting to read a register value from the Qtouch controller. I checked with a scope to see what is going on. I’ve checked the I2C specifications several times and found the error, somehow I had managed to violate the specifications of Bus free time between a STOP and START condition. Dropping a small delay just between the write and read operation solved the problem, a few minutes later I could already see the data streaming from my UART with Key status.

 
Next I placed the plexiglas sheet over the PCB and attempted to place my finger over the sensor to get some response. Not surprisingly the touch was registered by the controller and corresponding LED lit, but I had to push pretty hard against the plexiglass in order to get the response. Unfortunately the : board was dirty and there was an air gap between the plexiglas and sensors. As a result the charge between electrodes was not transferred as efficiently as it should. I cleaned the board and cut out a piece of adhesive sheet which is used in QT600 kit from Atmel. I placed it on the PCB and covered it with the plexiglas. The result was amazing, every button responded without any delay or additional pressure. No additional calibration was required to make the whole thing work at the first try.

Step 7

I have told Altium that it would be a great idea, simply to show future customers or existing ones, that Altium provides all the tools that are necessary to make a touch design work (or any other design for that matter). From a conceptual idea to a prototype to a finalized design, all the tools are in one neat package. What I'm proposing here is the following: I'm going to use some of my spare time to write a QTouch driver for the Nanoboard, and next time, when I'm taking pictures or shoot a video, the Nanoboard will be the at the centre and not some microcontroller from Texas Instruments :)

Step 8
At the very end the new polycarbonate front panels have arrived, with black silkscreen and as you can see from the images, they look much better now. The panel comes now with 16 buttons. As far as myself and my collegues are concerned, the work on Qtouch is done and finalized and we are very happy with the results, thanks to Altium and Atmel. With the additional boards for that project to be done, we have a complete prototype for our PA Access Panel ready in the next couple of days.   

As you can see from the second image, I have used the Nanoboard to verify and test the panel. I have used a Peripheral board, soldered some IDC headers to the I2C lines and spare GPIO pins. To verify the panel functionality, I have created a small test project based around a TSK3000 soft CPU, attached some peripherals, some LED's, an I2C controller (obviously) and TFT panel  and threw in a soft terminal. An hour later everything was up and running.


Just to summarize the time needed for that design:

 

2 days:             Preliminary subject study (Qtouch theory, Charge transfer techniques etc.)

1 day:               Board specifications study (how many buttons, size, look and feel)

8 hours:            Schematic Capture and board level design
                        (including the time spent to set up project files,
                        layer stack-up, rules and reviewing the final design)

2 weeks:           PCB production time including shipping

2 hours:            Component placement and soldering

1 day:               Developing the Qtouch driver




























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