Hey guys!
Horrible timing, my bare conductive touch board died 2 days before I’m due to present an artwork for uni that relies on it.
It started throwing errors on and off, then flat out refuses to start. Luckily my Pi Zero is unscathed. The Bare Conductive hat gets super hot when plugged in. Until now it’s been working fine.
My question is, is there any way I can avoid this happening in the future? I’m now concerned that if I make artwork reliant on this tech, that it could really leave me in a pickle. Are there any other boards I can consider, or should I be getting a dedicated bareconductive board rather than the pi cap (which is discontinued according to bareconductive).
I need a replacement ASAP 
Cheers,
Marian
Hi Marian
A dedicated proven device would be my suggestion. Personally I tend to steer clear of most of these “hat” type devices until they have proven to be a bit reliable, especially if I intend to use multiples. I have not used RPi yet so the “hat” line of products I have no experience with but there are a multitude of others around which do similar things.
I sometimes get the impression that some of these manufacturers develop (???) and produce (probably a better word) a product then release it on the unsuspecting hobby or maker market and this vast group become the test room. Anything to get to market quickly.
I know it is impossible to foresee everything but if a product is released and is made known to be still in “beta” stage and still under development that is fine. In these cases the end user will provide information to enable the final proven release to be made. In the situation we find ourselves in these days most of these things seem to be a ridiculously low price and for that we get sometimes (not always) inferior quality and poor test record and often zero information and documentation. But that is the end result of purchasing the cheapest product we can find. Doesn’t seem to matter if it wasn’t designed to do the job that we want. Sad but unfortunately pretty true.
The saying about paying peanuts and getting monkeys comes to mind.
Cheers Bob
