The EggLight is a high tech light. Inside that tiny egg like housing is a microcontroller that powers an LED. A simple code based touch sensor was designed to turn the light on. To see more projects by Proteus have a look at his site.

Video after the jump.

“This is a Bedside Night Light I’ve built for my girlfriend according to her valentine’s specifications (hahaha I’m NOT kidding):

+It had to be small
+Portable soft lighting for “stealth home navigation” at night
+It had to be COOL !

The Design:
ping-pong ball + generic_product_cap + capacitive_sensor_made_with_a_pic = EggLight !

The Capacitive touch sensor itself is nothing more than… CODE =D (and some resistors)

You see, each Pin (well most of them anyway) in the PIC microcontroller can be programmed during runtime to be INPUT, OUTPUT(HIGH or LOW) or just to be FLOATING on a tri-state condition…

What you need to do is (look at the schematics so you’ll understand)
+Put Pin on High (gp_0)
+Let it Float (gp_0)
+Wait some time and read it’s value with same pin or another one (gp1)

if a person is holding his finger between the finger contacts the capacitance of the pin is greatly increased , this way the gap of time that the Pin will take to discharge (during float) will be much larger than normal operation (no finger)… now look at the code below using two pins:”

Thanks Diego.