I don’t see an enhancement request in the github fritzing app issues here
a search of the form "is:issue is:open hatched ground planes " returns zero results. As a result (and because development has restarted after stopping in 2016) I would suggest creating an enhancement request on github so the developers see it (they do read the forums, but not all that often I don’t think!) While it is painfully manual (and I am not an expert on ground fill), I think the suggested workaround in
is likely still the best solution. Basically you need to start from an svg where Fritzing has done the ground fill and then replace the ground fill with the cross hatch pattern in an svg editor such as Inkscape manually (making sure to connect the copper to the ground fill seed in the svg!) and substitute it back in to replace the solid fill with the cross hatch. I have no experience with ESPs or touch pads so hopefully someone else can answer your series resistor questions. There are some recommendations in the referenced app note though.
I did some ongoing reading and found a remark at the Espressif App Note:
3.3.7. Ground Plane
Ground fill refers to a large area of copper used as reference ground to isolate interferences. The ground fill can be solid or hatched. Ground fill is one of the most important steps in touch sensor design. The following are general guidelines to adding a ground fill:
Hatched ground is a tradeoff between enhancing anti-interference ability and maintaining high sensitivity
Add hatched ground around the touch electrodes. Do not add ground fill on the opposite side of the electrode if there are no interference sources.
Add ground fill at least 1 mm away from the touch electrodes.
Add ground fill at least 0.5 mm away from the touch traces.
Typical hatching for the ground fill is 19% (5 mil line, 50 mil spacing).
Do not add a solid ground within 10 mm of the touch electrodes or traces
I stubled upon the statement: “The ground fill can be solid or hatched.” vs. “Do not add a solid ground within 10 mm of the touch electrodes …” so it seems to be possible without hatched ground but perhaps not optimal.
Yes, reading the app note it seems to be an interference issue, and the hatched ground plane works better. It seems to depend on all sorts of issues so you may need to experiment to find what works best. They appear to think that hatched ground fill is a better solution though so the manual work around may be the only current solution in Frtizing. It may be worthwhile to try a double board one with solid ground fill one with hatched and see if one works better than the other. I expect the issue is not detecting what should be key presses so seeing if one option gets less missed presses than the other is probably the way to evaluate it. As I said I haven’t ever tried touch sensors so I am not all that aware of what the issues are.
so how would i go about making a capacitive touch strip that changes increases resistance as i slide over it ? almost like turning the knob on a potentiometer? i’d love to be able to slide across and play midi cc parameter in my music software , by just moving my finger back and forth.
I don’t know of a capacitive touch chip that will do that (there may however be one!), the usual answer is a force sensitive resistor (doing a google search for source sensitive resistor should find some, there are several parts in core parts as well.)