Interactive projection: ProPresenter 6, Arduino Leonardo, and 3D printed capacitive buttons

Interactive Projection

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to reproduce the interactive projection that I saw at SALT 2016 in Nashville (watch the video above to see what I mean).

I think I’ve finally got all the pieces in place and thought I’d collect all the lessons in one place, along with the downloads for each.

[tweet “Click here to learn how to make an interactive projection system with ProPresenter6 & 3D printed capacitive buttons: “]

ProPresenter 6 programming

First, I created this interactive projection presentation (click to download) in Pro6 which you can learn how to do yourself by watching this tutorial. It’s controlled by a keyboard, but that’s not really helpful.

Controlling it with Arduino

To control it with button presses, you need an Arduino Leonardo. Click here to watch the tutorial about how I did it or just download the code here.

Creating and printing the buttons

Creating the buttons themselves is pretty easy. I went to a site that allows you to do 3D modeling for free and then printed them out at my local library. Click here to watch the tutorial to learn how to get started in 3D printing or just download the 3D model here.

Making the buttons capacitive

Plastic buttons don’t really do much though, so I made them touch sensitive by adding capacitive capabilities to the Arduino code and wired them into the project with conductive tape and some resistors. To see that, watch this tutorial.

It’s not a hard project, but there are a ton of steps, so make sure you download the files and follow the steps and you can create something really fun for your church lobby or children’s area.