What is the HDK-1?
The Haptic Development Kit (HDK-1) is a microcontroller-based development kit and custom circuit board designed to facilitate haptic interaction research.
This flexible wireless device provides plug-n-play support for up to five capacitive sensor inputs and five motor outputs.
HDK-1 Features
The HDK-1’s input mechanism is a set of capacitive touch sensors. These flexible copper pads sense conductive materials, like fingers, and are equipped with hatched shield pads to reduce false positives.
For motor output, the HDK-1 uses Linear Resonant Actuators (LRAs) to create vibrotactile signals. The intensity and pattern of these vibrations are fully customizable through a Xrpa signal processing module.

Both the capacitive touch sensors and the LRAs are connected to 12”-long leads that can be glued, taped, or embedded in rubber housings, as pictured above.
The HDK-1 operates by sending and receiving data wirelessly via a Bluetooth dongle.
Want a jump start on how to send signals to the HDK-1’s LRAs? Check out our Signal Processing Guide
