I recently bought a nice RGB Led Controller with a very nice design and i want to know what technology is used for recognising the touches on this thick plastic layer. It works absolutely reliable and is very sensitive. I wanted to integrate exactly something like that in my arduino project. Anyone an idea which companies are making such capacitive touch panels and do i need some kind of controller? (Note: i am very new to electronics) 
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perotom
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This is most likely a capacitive touch interface.
This by making use of the rule that all circuit elements have some amount of capacitance, be it a capacitor a resistor or even a piece of wire.
The capacitance of these pieces is also weakly affected by certain materials, usually somewhat conductive themselves such as pieces of metal, wires or you.
There are a number of different ways to measure this but the easiest is measuring how long it takes to charge and discharge the capacitor this creates.
More information can be found on the Arduino website, see link below.
http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor?from=Main.CapSense
Hugoagogo
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so it should be very easy for a manufacture to create something like that and also fairly cheap right? – perotom Apr 02 '15 at 14:55
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Yep, there is probably a fair amount of research that goes into the sizing of the pads and making it robust, but nothing that would stop you hobbling together something similar at home for next to nothing – Hugoagogo Apr 02 '15 at 22:03