What is the Bare Conductive Touch Board?

The Touch Board in one paragraph

The Bare Conductive Touch Board is an Arduino-compatible microcontroller with two key capabilities baked in: it can detect touch through 12 capacitive electrodes, and it can play MP3 audio files from a microSD card. Combine those two things and you can make almost any physical surface into a musical instrument or interactive interface — without writing a single line of code.

What Bare Conductive makes

Bare Conductive is a company (based in London, founded 2009) that develops materials and electronics for creative and educational use. Their flagship product range includes:

• Touch Board — the microcontroller covered in these tutorials
• Electric Paint — an electrically conductive paint that works like a wire you can brush, stamp, or print onto almost any surface
• Pi Cap — similar capacitive touch capability for the Raspberry Pi

The 12 electrodes

The Touch Board has 12 numbered pads (E0–E11) on its lower edge. Each pad is a separate touch input. When you connect something conductive to a pad — a wire, a painted line, a foil strip, a piece of fruit — the Touch Board detects when that object is touched or approached.

Built-in MP3 player

The VS1053 chip on the Touch Board can decode MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, WMA, and FLAC audio files. Files live on a microSD card (included). Touch electrode E0 → play TRACK000.mp3. Touch E1 → play TRACK001.mp3. No code needed in the default mode.

Arduino compatible

The Touch Board runs on an ATmega32U4 microcontroller — the same chip as the Arduino Leonardo. This means it’s fully programmable via the Arduino IDE. You can override the default touch-to-sound behaviour and make the board do anything you can code.

What you can make

• Paper instruments — draw a keyboard on paper with Electric Paint
• Interactive books — pages that play narration when touched
• Musical walls — murals that play notes when visitors touch painted areas
• Sound maps — a painted map where touching each country plays its national anthem
• Wearable sensors — fabric interfaces that respond to body contact
• Plant instruments — wires in plant pots that play music when you touch the leaves
• Educational displays — science exhibits that explain concepts through touch

What you need

To follow this tutorial series, you’ll need:

For the programming tutorials you’ll also need:

• The Arduino IDE (free, arduino.cc)
• The Touch Board Arduino library (explained in article 5)

The default mode — no code required

Out of the box, the Touch Board runs a sketch called Intertface (note the deliberate ‘intertface’ spelling — it’s a portmanteau of interface and touch). In this mode:

• Touching E0–E11 plays the corresponding MP3 file from the SD card
• The board auto-detects the baseline capacitance of whatever is connected and calibrates
• No computer connection required — it runs on a 5V USB power bank or phone charger

This default mode is enough for many projects. You only need to program the board when you want custom behaviour.

Key takeaways

• The Touch Board combines 12-electrode capacitive touch sensing with a built-in MP3 player
• It’s Arduino-compatible — programmable with the same IDE and libraries
• The default mode (no code needed) maps touches to MP3 files on an SD card
• Electric Paint turns any surface into a touch electrode
• You can make interactive paper, musical walls, wearables, and more