I'm a newbie and I've been playing with the awesome Adafruit CAP1188 capacitive touch gizmo.
As long as I keep the length of the wires from the CAP1188 to my copper sticky pads to a couple of feet, everything works perfectly. But as soon as I go beyond say 4 feet it stops working.
I spent a few hours experimenting with different length of wires and tweaking the CAP1188 sensitivity, but nothing works.
What I really like about the capacitive sensor approach is that it's fairly inexpensive. The CAP1188 is $8, it self-calibrates and can drive (on paper) 40 capacitive touch pads which can be made out of sticky copper tape, and the whole thing only uses 2 or 3 pins on my Arduino. I need 32 sensors for my project. You can think of my project as the equivalent of a giant/3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game). Using some kind of mechanical switch is not out of the question either as long as it's sturdy, cheap and/or easy to make.
What am I doing wrong? Is it something inherent to the capacity touch technology that renders the use of wires with a length beyond a few feet inoperable? Should I be using some other technology such as Pressure-Sensitive Conductive Sheet?
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!