Design and Characterization of Crossbar architecture Velostat-based Flexible Writing Pad

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, flexible Velostat-based pressure sensing matrix integrated into a writing pad, along with crosstalk analysis and image processing techniques to improve readability and usability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel flexible writing pad with a Velostat-based sensor array and provides a detailed crosstalk analysis and mitigation approach.

Findings

The writing pad can resolve characters larger than 2 cm.

It maintains functionality with a bending radius of up to 4 cm.

Crosstalk can be effectively mitigated using proposed algorithms.

Abstract

Pressure sensors are popular in a large variety of industries. For some applications, it is critical for these sensors to come in a flexible form factor. With the development of new synthetic polymers and novel fabrication techniques, flexible pressure sensing arrays are more easily accessible and can serve a variety of applications. As part of this dissertation, we demonstrate one such application of the same by developing a low-cost flexible writing pad and doing crosstalk analysis on sensors with similar working principles. We present a low-cost, flexible writing pad that uses a 16x16 pressure sensing matrix based on the piezoresistive thin film of velostat. The writing area is 5 cm x 5 cm with an effective pixel area of 0.06 mm^2. A read-out circuit is designed to detect the change in resistance of the velostat pixel using a voltage divider. A microprocessor raster scans through the sensor pixel matrix to obtain a data frame of 256 numbers. This data is processed using techniques like squaring and normalising (S\&N), Gaussian blurring, and adaptive thresholding to generate a more readable output. The writing pad is able to resolve characters larger than 2 cm in length. The flexible writing pad produces legible output while flexed at a bending radius of up to 4 cm. Such flexibility promises to enhance the usability and portability of the writing pad significantly. We noticed that the raw data produced by the writing pad had a lot of crosstalk which we were subsequently able to resolve using the algorithms mentioned above. Such crosstalk has been reported in literature multiple times and is common, especially for sensors of the crossbar architecture.Crosstalk, in a sensor matrix, is the unwanted signal obtained at a sensor pixel that is not directly related to the stimulus. This paper presents a novel approach towards quantifying the crosstalk characteristics of a sensor matrix.