Retail Defender is a capacitive touch/proximity solution that retailers can use to help deter shoplifting to adapt to the changing technologies. We have created a custom PCB that interfaces with Texas Instruments’ capacitive MCUs to address our problem. Our PCB has haptics, LEDs, LCD, a speaker, capacitive touch keypad, and capacitive touch/proximity sensing area. The object to be detected should be placed in the circular area of our PCB, the sensing plate. In this area, the capacitive electrodes are observed to ensure that electrodes do not detect the removal of the object if the user has not yet entered the correct passcode via the keypad. If a user does remove the object off of the sensing plate without the correct passcode, our speaker will sound until the object is placed back down. To successfully disarm the system, the user must enter the correct passcode. We hope that our system can pose great benefits for retailers with customizable tuning of the sensors and expansion of the sensing plate.

Team Members

Wilhelm Bagcal, Vishal Bhongir, Kangji Chen, Edaline Engmann, Arnav Mehrotra, Gwen Nguyen, Hunter Pischke