How to make a Capacitive Stylus - Homemade

Capacitive Stylus - How to make your own

It's really easy and cheap to make your own Capacitive Stylus. I made one for my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to use with Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop Touch. It works great with that, my HTC Desire HD, Galaxy Ace, Galaxy S3 and even my old iPod Touch. Capacitive Stylus are quite expensive to buy and that's the main reason to make your own, you can do it for a price that's almost free! All you need for a home-made stylus is listed below. This is the very high-end Samsung Galaxy Bluetooth Stylus collection. Your only going to need 3 things to build your own stylus.

1. Something that resembles a pen
2. some strips of tin or aluminium foil
3. piece of a sponge
4. optionally you could use some sticky tape to hold things in place better.

Capacitive Screens - How do they Work?

All capacitive screens use the electrical charge from your skin to tell it where on the screen you are touching. You need to replicate that same electrical charge from your skin with a stylus to make the stylus work the same as a finger. The way we do this is by simply passing the electrical charge from your finger through something and then into the screen. That something will be our home-made capacitive stylus.

How to Build Your Own Home-Made Capacitive Stylus

Take whatever you plan to use as the pen/grip and wrap the foil strips around the handle so that the foil will be in contact with your hand when holding the stylus. If you are using the optional sticky tape then now would be a good time to use it to hold down the foil. Next thing to do is take the piece of sponge and pull it over the point of your stylus, this will protect the screen from scratches - again if you're using tape stick the sponge down with it but the less tape you use the more surface area there will be to conduct the electricity and drive the screen's touch events. If you don't have tape then wrapping more foil around the ends of the sponge will hold it on well enough to stop it falling off. You now have a home-made Capacitive Stylus.

What to do Once You've Built your own Stylus or You Have Problems Getting it to Work

Once your stylus is built you may run into the problem of it not behaving like your finger at all! It's mostly dependent on just how conductive your sponge is and some sponges are much better at conducting than others. Don't worry if it doesn't even work at all yet - sometimes you need to wet the sponge ever so slightly. Wet the sponge by dipping your finger in some water and then rubbing it on the sponge. It doesn't have to be too wet, just wet enough to conduct the electricity.

Make Your Capacitive Stylus More Conductive

To make the stylus more conductive all you need do is wet the sponge slightly. Take your finger and dip it in some water then use what's left on your finger to wet the sponge. It only has to be a tiny bit wet and shouldn't leave distracting visible water lines on your screen. Making the sponge slightly wet increases the conductivity greatly.

How it Works

The way capacitive screens work is by detecting the tiny natural electrical charge from your skin and using that to tell when and where the screen is touched. A capacitive stylus works by sending the electrical charge that is in your skin down through the stylus to the screen. With our stylus this works by passing that electrical charge down through the foil to the sponge and finally onto the touch screen emulating a touch event. Some sponges aren't very good at passing the electricity to the screen - that's why often you will need the sponge slightly wet.

What's the Point of making a Capacitive Stylus?

The reason I made my capacitive stylus  was to use drawing and painting apps on my Galaxy Tab 10.1. I use Photoshop Touch and Sketchbook Pro with much greater accuracy and ease than I had before I made the stylus. In fact the one I've made works better than the cheap one I bought off ebay! For just pennies you can make your own stylus that works better than it's factory made Counter part. Obviously if you have $15-30 to spend on a good stylus then you will get one that work better than anything you could make yourself in less than 10 minutes - but do you want to spend money on a stylus you will only occasionally? I mean stylus' have their place (graphics design, handwriting input to name just two) but as Steve Jobs says:

"It's like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it."

How often would you really use one? If your employed as a full-time as a graphics designer then you'll probably own a dedicated pen/touch input device to use with your graphics program and your average, or even high-end, touch screen inputs aren't going to be nearly responsive or accurate enough for your liking.

Don't Buy a Stylus When You Can Make One

There is no point in paying anything for a capacitive stylus when you can make one yourself in under 5 minutes - with just the stuff lying around your house . If you don't have what you need at home to make a capacitive stylus then it's still cheaper for you to go out and buy all the items needed to make them for less than the cost of buying one-off of eBay. Don't buy a capacitive stylus, make one.