I’m building a lighting control system for a motorhome using ESP32 and MQQT. I have all the remote control stuff working well, but controlling a light you’re standing next to with a network connected device is not handy. I decided  touch control for turning on and dimming the lights would be great. Each ESP32 controls 4 channels of lighting via mosfet boards.

If I initiate a single channel of touch control it works fine. But when I add more the touch channels interfere with each other and become glitchy. I tried a version of debouncing to distinguish real touches from glitches, but there’s enough noise to ultimately overcome even the most aggressive delay. I read that the touch pins freely oscillate and touching one changes the frequency. It seems likely that the touch wires are acting like antennas, sending signals to each other.

Does anyone have any useful experience in making these sensors reliable?

The code I’m using is very simple, this version has no “debounce” filter since they didn’t work well enough.

//LED1
touchValue1 = touchRead(touchPin1);
// check if the touchValue is below the threshold
if(touchValue1 < threshold){
if (incLed1<254){
incLed1 = incLed1+4;
ledcWrite(ledChannel1, incLed1);
}

if (incLed1>254){
incLed1=0;
}
delay(30);
}