ADS-9960 Enclosure Design

Sensors Distance
1

I’m trying to design an enclosure for a gesture control device using the Sparkfun ADS-9960. I’m stuck on 2 things:

Is there any material that can mask the sensor, like the front of a tv remote? Will that type of material completely block the sensor? I suppose that can be tested easily with a part from a remote.

The capacitor that’s on the front of the ADS9960, looks like “100-10L L9 2”, can it be relocated? It protrudes a fair bit out of the front and makes it hard to put the sensor close to the front. I’m thinking I can pull it off with solder and resolder back with wires so I can have it out of the way.

Hope I’m not posting this in the wrong place.

2

You should be able to mount that cap on the back of the board. It goes between GND and VL. Make sure you get the polarity correct (stripe to VL). I would scrape the solder mask off a bit of the ground pour just under the i2c silkscreen and solder the ground end to that, and solder the positive end directly to the VL terminal.

/mike

3

Ah cool, nice one. I was worried in case there was another connection or something hidden beneath and only find out after. Cheers for that.

4

When these are in a phone, they are behind a thin pane of glass and still work. You might have to experiment with the thickness and opacity of whatever you end up using, but I would imagine the same type of ‘window’ used for IR remote controls would work. Maybe something really dark red?

5

n1ist:
You should be able to mount that cap on the back of the board. It goes between GND and VL. Make sure you get the polarity correct (stripe to VL). I would scrape the solder mask off a bit of the ground pour just under the i2c silkscreen and solder the ground end to that, and solder the positive end directly to the VL terminal.

/mike

Soldered it to the back in the position you described here. Works perfect, thank you. Nice flat profile now.
6

TS-Chris:
When these are in a phone, they are behind a thin pane of glass and still work. You might have to experiment with the thickness and opacity of whatever you end up using, but I would imagine the same type of ‘window’ used for IR remote controls would work. Maybe something really dark red?

Found an old remote plastic to test. It was off a broken wiiu gamepad, for communicating with tvs like a remote. Held it up to a light and it looks blue not red. I guess not all remote plastics are made equal. Anyways, I tested by sticking it over the ads9960 sensor to cover it. Nothing from the gestures. Proximity sensor wasn’t triggered, but wasn’t working either. I’ll keep an eye out for another one to test, hopefully its a red type when held up to the light.