Zytronic has announced the launch of its latest touch controller to go with the company’s large format, multi-touch touch sensors based on its proprietary MPCT projected capacitive (p-cap) technology. The ZXY300 has been developed for use with touchscreens that have diagonals greater than 55 inches, enabling touch point resolution to be achieved while maintaining what the company says is millisecond level response speeds. Running off a standard 12-volt supply, this compact (219×92-millimeter footprint) controller connects with the p-cap touch sensor via several flex tails or FPCBs. The ZXY300 has at its heart a 32-bit ARM Cortex microprocessor core containing Zytronic’s specially developed touch detection and processing firmware.

According to Zytronic the touch detection algorithms within the ZXY300’s firmware double the number of touch detecting channels that can be supported to 256, compared with 128 for the standard ZXY200 multi-touch controller (mainly aimed at smaller screens). As a result the capacitive sensing matrix within the touch sensor can be much denser, which in turn makes it possible to determine the positions of individual simultaneous touch events to far greater precision, even on the largest MPCT-based touchscreens of 84-inches.

Across the complete range of MPCT sensor sizes currently available, the ZXY300 has the capacity to support up to 40 simultaneous touch points being resolved with touch separation of <10-millimeters between each point (i.e., less than the width of a fingertip). Furthermore, thanks to the firmware specifically developed for the ZXY300, the additional data that needs to be captured to achieve this level of performance can still be gathered, processed and output to the host PC in less than 10-milliseconds.

This controller is both FCC and CE approved. An operational temperature range covering -40°C to +85°C allows it to be used for touchscreen deployments in harsh environments. It has ‘native’ plug-and-play support for the Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems, as well as latest Linux variants (kernel version >= 3.5.1), and in order to boost Linux touchscreen performance, Zytronic offers additional driver source code/tools that can be used to provide touch calibration. The company also provides a free ZyConfig software utility — for basic users this provides a simple set-up of the integrated multi-touch screen in a matter of minutes but also gives more advanced users direct access to the ZXY300 controller configuration for fine tuning.

Here are the details.