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Your customers want to have a great experience using your product.

A key aspect to that great experience is the performance of the capacitive touch sensor responding only when touched. From a touch sensor standpoint, this means that the sensitivity to a touch needs to be just right, just like Goldilocks would have it. If the sensitivity is too high or too low, your customer will likely get frustrated. If your customer is frustrated with their touch/user-experience, they will be frustrated with your product overall - regardless of how well the rest of your device works.

Anti-glare • Anti-fingerprints • Anti-scratch • Anti-smudge

Is it possible to have them all? The simple answer, no, HOWEVER, there are things suppliers can do to get you pretty darn close.

First, determine what is more important on your membrane switch:

• Having a crystal clear display?
• Anti-glare surface?
• Survival in sunlight (if used outdoors)?

In October 2017, Xymox achieved 1,000 days without a lost time injury.  This type of achievement doesn’t just happen by luck.  It takes a safety first conscious workforce, an active safety team, and a commitment from management to provide a safe work environment. Work place injuries are more than just a cost burden to a company, they affect the moral of the entire company, they impact friends and family, and can permanently change the injured workers life.  Xymox believes that not only can we prevent injuries from occurring in the workplace, but we can provide an environment where people can actually get healthier with such benefits as a wellness program, onsite chiropractic care, ergonomic work stations, and a healthy work/life balance.

When people hear about flexible circuits, it often leads to a follow up question: "can conductive ink be stretched?" There is a difference between “flexibility” and “stretching”. Flexibility means the inks can be placed in tension and continue to provide electrical continuity. 

When you consider adding a capacitive touch sensor to your application, you have options for how that sensor operates to achieve the functionality that is just right for your application. There is no one size fits all solution.

A die cut uses extremely sharp razors (aka steel rule) to cut the material into the desired shape. You may have seen or even used one on a smaller scale for punching out shapes of paper for scrap booking. A laser cutting machine uses an industrial strength laser to cut the material with the help of a computer to direct it where to move and cut. Check out this video for a glimpse of how each machine operates.

Xymox Technologies, Inc. has added automated vision CMM (Coordinate Measuring Machine) equipment to support our commitment to continuous improvement and quality. Our new Micro-Vu Excel 661UC vision CMM expands our metrology capabilities in terms of accuracy, repeatability and speed.

Design engineers are experts at what they do and their goal is to develop a great HMI (human machine interface) solution for your product. There are 4 things they want you to know so your correspondences can be productive.

Backlighting on a membrane switch can be a simple and cost effective solution to enhance the user experience. Backlighting can tell the user the current machine status, and it can help walk the user through the next operation steps. That sounds great, so what could possibly go wrong? Have you ever heard of a hot spot? No, not the one on your phone that you can turn on to share your wifi - a backlighting hot spot. It's when the light source used for backlighting doesn't evenly distribute the light causing some areas to appear brighter (hot spot), while others are dimly lit. The switch will still work just the same, however, having the total package be reliable AND good looking, is critical for your brand and the end user experience.

Xymox uses PEDOT (or more accurately PEDOT:PSS) to make capacitive sensors. We use a film version supplied by Kodak called KODAK ESTAR Highly Conductive (HCF) Films to make transparent sensors used over displays and a screen printed version supplied by Heraeus called Clevios to make translucent sensors used in backlighting applications. To keep the family together, Kodak actually coats Heraeus Clevios PEDOT.