US Patent 10007892 Capacitive sensor system

Capacitive sensors may be used to gather information, such as the presence of objects at an inventory location, such as a shelf. Two or more adjacent capacitive sensors operating at the same time may interfere with one another. Described are techniques to prevent this interference by using seed values to initialize pseudo random sequencing of an order in which capacitive sensors are in operation. The capacitive sensor, or a portion thereof, may be also be used as an antenna. Selection of an initial tuning network for use by the antenna may be determined based on output from the capacitive sensor.