A hole in middle of a capacitive touch screen

Question

I'm thinking about using a capacitive touch screen (the touch layer only, no display) to detect the position of two moving parts. Each part would have its 'stylus' just above the screen to mark the position. Unfortunately, such a use-case would require a rather large (1.5cm hole in 7cm screen) hole in the middle of the touch screen.

Have you tried to drill a hole into a capacitive touch screen? Will it work afterwards?

How accurate do you need the positioning? I think there are better ways to go about this... — Ron Beyer, Jul 20 '20 at 13:04
Why use a screen instead of just a simple capacitance sensor? You can make that on a PCB with just copper and a lot of MCUs support that kind of thing nowadays. — Hearth, Jul 20 '20 at 13:04
@Hearth Could you provide some example (link) on this approach, please? — Josef Kufner, Jul 20 '20 at 17:33
@RonBeyer Accuracy would be nice in milimeters. The primary motivation here is to use existing and cheap parts. — Josef Kufner, Jul 20 '20 at 17:35

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 20 '20 at 17:39

Most of capacitive touch screens are constructed as X,Y array of capacitive sensors.

Once You drill the hole in the middle You will open circuit some connection and might loose possibility to properly sense the touch in the rest of the touch screen. See example below:

It would be better to design custom capacitive Sensing board, that has connection the other way around.

A hole in middle of a capacitive touch screen

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