[Jani] directed us to his tutorial on making a laptop touchpad work with an Arduino. After seeing the recent post on touch pad and VFD hacking, he couldn’t resist finding one of these to play with. He shows us how to connect it all up and offers two methods of using the data from it. The first method is to determine the direction of finger travel and the second, shown above, is to use it more like the volume control on an iPod. Source code for both is available on his site.
[Agent420] brought up this touchpad and VFD hack in the comments on our capicitive sensor guide post. He had broken dell laptop from which he harvested the touchpad and an HP laserjet that contributed the VFD. Though the touchpad communicates using standard PS2 protocol, he wanted to use it with his Atmel 8535 AVR which required him to write some custom code. In the picture above, you can see the VFD displaying the coordinates of his finger. You can download his code as well as the spec sheets for the different pieces on the project thread.
The fine folks at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) are demoing a new touchscreen system that may make small devices easier to use. An extension of their LucidTouch technology, NanoTouch has a small screen on the front and a touchpad on the back. Their test unit features a 2.4inch screen. The screen displays where the user’s finger is on the back touchpad as if the display was transparent. The user’s finger no longer obscures the screen surface, so it’s much easier to hit small buttons. In testing, researchers showed that targets just 1.8mm across were easy to hit. That’s much smaller than the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard. Here’s a video demonstrating the new device.
[ERASME] built this interactive globe interface for an exhibit on Inuit people and their land. The goal was to have a tactile input device to Google Earth data. The unit is composed of a half globe for location selection, a touch pad for layer selection, and a Wiimote for view changes.They had to develop their own driving application for Google Earth as none exists for Linux. The software, called KeyEvents takes inputs from all the devices and mimics keyboard and mouse control in Google Earth.
There is much more information on how they got the pieces to work together, as well as some videos in french showing the device working. One thing that stands out though is that they decided to use direct association on their Wiimote, thus stopping rogue Wiimotes from gaining control. Who would carry a Wiimote around just to hijack public displays? We would.
