Dane.Kouttron

  Fixing Touchscreen Gloves  [Quick Project]

Did you get a pair of swanky winter gloves that are compatible with smartphone touchscreen use?
Did they stop working after a year or two?

Here's a quick write up to get them back up and running again!

What?
 Q-Tip application Conductive Paints Conclusion Image Directory

Misbehaving Gloves
Touchscreen compatible gloves are actually just gloves with 'somewhat conductive pads' on some fingertips. Generally its the index finger and thumb, as those are generally used on phone interfaces. While there are some devices that have extended-sensitivity mode for capacitive touchscrens, enabling and disabling that is somewhat annoying. There appear to be two routes to get 'conductive-ish' patches on gloves, a conductive fabric material or, literally sewing a conductive thread around the area in question. The conductive pad does not need to actually make its way to electrically touch the person, but has to more or less have similar conductive properties.
This is apparent if you try and use a metal screwdriver on a capacitive touchscreen, too conductive does not work.

Conductive paint / ink


Conductive fabric seemed like a niche item and I wasnt terribly excited about re-sewing gloves, but I reasoned that Conductive paint may work, it is also surprisingly readily available. I had purchased this paint [link] to repair the membrane pushbuttons on my makerbot replicator 2, and concluded it was worth testing out on the gloves. This specific conductive paint is from Bare Conductive. They are also available on amazon for quicker shipping [amazon link].

Applying conductive paint with a Q-Tip

I didnt have a paintbrush on hand, but i did have q-tips, or rather their corner-store brand equivalent. I put a fairly heavy coat on dabbing around as shown (right). I was kinda curious to see if the paint would wear off quickly or not so i figured a thicker coating would be better than a realitivley thin coat. The Q-Tip did work surprisingly well as a paintbrush, as you could push into the gloves, where a paintbrush would have likely deflected more.
Interestingly when i put my hand into the glove after q-tip painting it, i did notice some areas that needed more coverage. I opted to wear the glove and re-apply with a Q-tip to the fingertips and get the spots that were missed.

Alternate application using the glove itself
Do you know what worked way better than a q-tip? Using the glove itself. I mushed the conductive paint between index finger and thumb while wearing the glove and, well it was really straightforward. This process does work incredibly well.

It works!
Now the boring part, waiting a few hours for the paint to fully set. At the time the room temperature was 21C / ~70F, which i think is fairly important to get the paint to set correctly. As you'd imagine fixing winter gloves in winter conditions with paint at low temperatures probably would end poorly. It was getting late and i didnt get lighting setup right but, the moment of truth:
It works great! You obviously never got the same dexterity with gloves as with bare fingers but even on a smaller phone it worked remarkably well.

Final product

This is super simple but I had not found any tutorials online doing the same process. After two snowstorms they seem to still be working fine, i anticipated the paint flaking off, but ~3 weeks in and it seems fine so far!



<I'm trying a new format with more animated video clips, bare with me I'm sorting out what works well>








(There's other photos in the photo gallery)
Concluding Remarks:

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Dane.Kouttron
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 
Electrical & Electrical Power
631.978.1650