It would seem my coding issue from before actually turned out to be a hardware issue, as the analogue demultiplexers I was using should have been 4051′s, not the 4052′s that i bought by mistake… Note to self: stop ordering things off the net while mildly drunk…

The other IC’s i tested were the 4067′s, which are 16 channels instead of 8. They work perfectly, but they are £1.40 a piece instead of 30p for the 4051 chips.Why, I don’t know, maybe there’s an army of pink elephants inside doing the work.

Also, as its been pointed out by Seb via email, capacitive touch sensors and the arduino can be configured for distance sensing, which is true and I played about with this with the Qprox chips previously, which I didnt make clear in the last post, but at the moment i’m still in favour of the IR sensors despite the one issue of ambient IR lighting conditions, which while this can be over come to an extent, strong direct light will create false positives.

But where’s the fun if everything was too easy? ;O)