Description

Resistive touchscreens are incredibly popular as superimposed on TFT and LCD screens. If you want to connect one to a computer, you need something to handle analog-to-digital conversion. Most of the converters we found are not very easy to use, and are " fixed " - making them difficult to calibrate. The AR1100 is a chip that solves this problem by acting as a touch->USB converter and is also supplied with calibration software. The calibration software is only Windows compatible, but once you have calibrated, you can use the screen on any OS. The AR1100 is presented as an HID device for a mouse or scanner, so no driver is required. We tested it successfully on Mac, Windows and Debian Linux (Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi). Other Linux distributions may or may not work, but if you are using Linux, you are probably used to that.

This breakout card is equipped with the AR1100, which has USB and UART interfaces. 99% of the time, you will want to use the USB interface but there is some functionality to output TTL UART data (see data sheet for more details) There is also a red LED that lights up to indicate when a key has been detected.

For screens equipped with FPC cables with 1mm pitch, you can connect the cable directly to the connector. The majority of medium/large touchscreens have this type of connector. If you have another type of touch screen, the four X/Y contacts are available in 0.1" increments so that you can weld them by hand or wire them. We set this breakout card for 4-wire detection only.

You can pretty much just plug and play to get started, for more details including calibration software, check out the AR1100 page. Plug any 1mm-pitch 4-wire resistive touchscreen to the on-board FPC connector, when you plug into a computer's USB port you should see a new device and touching the screen will cause the mouse cursor to move around.

Features

• Dimensions: 20.2mm / 0.79" x 28.2mm / 1.11" x 5.8mm / 0.22"

Documentation

AR1100 Resistive Touch Screen Controller Guide