Cheap, Small LED or LCD Touch Sensitive Screens?

emf2268 asks: "I'm looking to either purchase or build (I'll do the circuitry myself if I have to) several dozen, small screens for an arcade game that uses a touch interface. Each screen, which should be around 6-10 inches, needn't be extremely advanced in the display department, since 16 colors will do just fine. An LED or LCD would do the job. But each screen also needs to be touch sensitive...it only needs to know if it's been touched, not where it was touched. How, can I build this as cheaply as possible?"

Comments

Real cheap

[Peter Simpson]

If I were trying to do this on the real cheap, I'd use conductive bags. Cut a square of the material, place it backwards (inside out) over a plexi backer, with the LEDs behind it. A non-conductive) bezel over the front to keep all in place. Connect the conductive inner layer of the bag material to a high impedance circuit with a spring contact and sense the "body antenna effect" (as on the old microwave ovens),

It's much cheaper than metallized glass. But maybe you want to go that way.

You can use an LED matrix as both display & se

[saccade.com]

It turns out you can use LED arrays as both displays and sensors. People have successfully used them for touch sensor controllers. See this blog for some experiments. The original concept came out of the NYU media lab.