MPR121 Oscillating

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MPR121 Oscillating

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nimabadi
Contributor I

I just started using the MPR121 in a custom board, with pads laid out within the recommended tolerances (although the pads were on the large end, 13x13 mm).  I loaded the registers with the configuration specified in the quick-start guide.  The MPR121 is doing fine when no pads are touched, but when one of the pads is touched, the output in the status register oscillates between the "touched" state and the "released" state.  The time that the finger is on the pad increases the fraction of the cycle when it registers as touched. When the finger is removed, the pad continues to oscillate, and the duty cycle decreases, but never seems to reach 0 (ie the "touched" output continues to oscillate).

I have tried varying the filtering settings and the threshold values, but the oscillations continue to occur even when the touch and release thresholds are spread far apart (0x3F for touch and 0x05 for release were the most recent settings I have tried). 

Does anyone know what is happening here?

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reyes
NXP TechSupport
NXP TechSupport

Hi Nima Badizadegan,

Be careful with arbitrary increases in the electrode size. Larger electrodes easily detect the presence and absence of a finger. However, in some cases, they can be more sensitive to electrical noise or undesirable surrounding objects. Moreover, increased electrode size might also overlap with the detection areas corresponding to the surrounding electrodes, resulting in erroneous detections. It is important to keep a functional clearance between different electrodes. Functional clearance is the distance between the electrodes needed to avoid one finger touch affecting more than one electrode at a time. Functional clearance helps to avoid false touch detections caused by the physical proximity of keys.

As a recommended lecture, I would like to recommend you to take a look at the application note AN3863.

One of the things this document describes is the recommended patterns to distinguish valid touches where key size and distance between two keys are restricted.

Have a great day,
Jose Reyes

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