Used to be just me. But two amazing people assisting me now (one of them full-time); immediately took this decision upon recognizing the significant community interest from Reddit, et al.
The trackpad is one of my favorite recent Blocks. It's a great instance of circuit scalability. I use standard projected-capacitive-touch with a sensing IC that reads a rectangular grid of electrodes -- but they are all printed on the PCB, thus adding no significant cost whether small or big, sparse or dense.
The difficult part was two things:
- optimizing SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) at the sensing stage of the code
- and converting the input data to actual action-coordinates (relative) that are submitted as emulated-input to the OS.
Software filtering helped with the former. For the latter, I started with and customized an algorithm documented in an a manufacturer's application-note document (I think it was Microchip or Azoteq).
I hope you keep at it and we'll be able to get our hands on one some day. It's so ridiculously cool!
Currently I'm waiting on a ClockworkPi devterm as my new laptop replacement.
I'd love to replace my phone with a pockit, with a small physical keyboard module, and replace my laptop with a megapockit with a huge backplane and a big modular keyboard.
The possbilities! Thanks again for making something so cool and inspirational!
> megapockit with a huge backplane and a big modular keyboard
Look at that... the human mind is phenomenal.
We're not all ultra-skilled, detail-oriented electrical engineers. So why does every person have to go through (a tiring rite of passage of) wiring, soldering, debugging, coding from scratch -- instead of using the same creative mind and effort to come up with ideas, and actually play with their implementation?
I'm not primarily a developer, but it's easy to see how much the software world mushroomed through DRY, modularity, etc. In some ways, Pockit is an effort to do the same for electronics prototyping.
How do you even get your hands on/produce such a weirdly sized trackpad?!