[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt_VmJljmKU]
[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.
This is just awesome! Finally a use for all those old broken laptops I’ve been keeping.
Now if someone can come up with a hack that will give me more then 24 hours in a day, I’ll be set.
amphetamines?
Phew, an arduino.
Nice job. as you see, because the touchpad responds like any std mouse it is fairly easy to use.
It’s been a while since I worked on this last (refer to my tp + vfd post), but I seem to recall that I chose not to use the availble ps2 functions on my avr because they only provided reading data, and not the ability to write the command to the touchpad to change the mode from relative to absolute, which I desired so I could delegate certain areas of the pad as button type input.
Are you using absolute or relative mode here?
@jeremey
someone did
http://xkcd.com/320/
@Hiroe: win.
Up next on hack-a-day:
cell phone + arduino
paper clip + arduino
and what you have all been waiting for:
small puppy + arduino
@mcsquid
I’m sure this could be used for small puppies also: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/24/wireless-arduino-cat-food-dispenser/
I wonder how hard it would be to interface a multi-touch trackpad to the arduino, similar to the ones on the EEEPC or newer Macbooks.
stupid. useless. crap.
What about controlling audio effects with this?
Neat! I’ll take a dozen over easy.
If anybody else want’s to experiment with those devices: At pollin.de you can order them for 0.75 Euro. That is a very much better price than on ebay. But I don’t know if they ship overseas.