A touch-sensor system is built on a substrate which carries electrodes and relevant connections under a protective flat surface. When a user touches the surface, the capacitance variation is triggered and a binary signal is generated to indicate whether the touch is valid.
ESP32 can provide up to 10 capacitive touch pads / GPIOs. The sensing pads can be arranged in different combinations, so that a larger area or more points can be detected. The touch pad sensing process is under the control of a hardware-implemented finite-state machine (FSM) which is initiated by software or a dedicated hardware timer.