TI reference designs bring more imagination to next-generation home appliances

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TI reference designs bring more imagination to next-generation home appliances [Copy link]

We interact with human-machine interfaces (HMIs) every day. Some of these interactions are obvious, such as when touching the home screen of a smartphone or tablet, but the most common HMI environments are in industrial applications.

　　At various home appliance and consumer electronics exhibitions held in recent years, we have found that more and more home appliances (such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaner robots, cooking stoves and range hoods) have added HMI touch keys and LED animation functions. Driven by this trend, designers have made their products more intelligent and modern through user-friendly interactive functions.

　　Capacitive sensing technology plays a very important role in realizing the above functions. When designing home appliances, the focus is on reliability, robustness, and how to make the product more attractive. With the capacitive touch user interface based on proximity sensing and LED animation reference design, designers can implement innovative features in home appliances, such as preset lighting modes, lower standby power consumption, and moisture resistance.

　　This reference design uses a single MSP430FR2522 microcontroller (MCU) based on CapTIvate? touch technology and advanced LED drive technology, as shown in the figure below. Each of the six capacitive touch I/O channels has a specific purpose. In this particular design, three are used for dial control, two are used for buttons, and one is used for proximity sensing. Precise control can be achieved even in the presence of splashing grease or water droplets.

　　Block diagram of the capacitive touch and LED animation reference design

　　Another advantage of the MSP430 CapTIvate MCU is that it can enter low-power mode, with standby power consumption of only a few microwatts, which helps meet strict energy efficiency standards for products or extend battery life. The reference design provides proximity sensing to help the MCU quickly and easily recover from low-power mode to active mode, and the luminous ring with LED animation provides a good example for attractive and innovative user interfaces in next-generation devices. For example, when there are splashes of water or grease on the stovetop, it is very important to have perfect control of the stove at any time. The very low standby power consumption of the CapTIvate MCU enables designers to meet the highest energy-saving standards.

　　The LP5569 LED driver is equipped with built-in secure random access memory (SRAM) memory for user-programmed sequences and three programmable LED engines. Using the integrated engine, preset modes are stored in the program memory so that the LED driver can automatically run a blinking or color mode, which allows low system resource usage of the MCU when running LED animations.

　　In the capacitive touch user interface based on proximity sensing and LED animation reference design, users can use three operating modes:

　　Proximity sensing mode: When it senses the approach of a hand, the board will wake up from sleep mode and switch to active mode indicated by LEDs.

　　Autonomous Modes: Pre-stored autonomous modes can be selected at the touch of a button, such as Breathing (single or mixed color fading in and out), Chasing (single or mixed color), Two Color Chasing (one color chasing based on another color) or any other mode programmed by the color designer.

　　Control Mode: Control mode demonstrates how a user can control a capacitive dial with their finger while the app provides feedback via an LED ring.

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Good sharing, I'll learn from it.