Hi!
So, I've recently purchased a standalone Macbook replacement trackpad (Apple MacBook Genuine A1278 MB466LL/A MB466 Silver Touchpad & Cable 821-1254-A) and I'm trying to figure out how to interface it with my Arduino Uno. The end goal is to turn it into an XY-Pad MIDI controller.
Here's a very similar project:
I think I need to determine the pinout of the Macbook trackpad, and am having a hard time finding resources.
Do you have any tips or resources I could use to help me out?
If you are lucky, the MacBook trackpad is a USB device which would only require a USB Host Shield (or equivalent). Does it have a four-wire (or maybe 5-wire) cable?
Some kind of Hiroshi flexible cable connector. Check sparkfun to see if they have any matching plugs.
So it sounds like one of the trackpads where most of the electronics are on the laptop motherboard rather than the in the trackpad. That 22-pin connection will be tough to reverse-engineer.
The thing about track pads is that they can't just give you an xy coordinate, because there is also the size of the object, the pressure applied, depending on the complexity of the model, there may be multiple points, so you would really need a second microcontroller to just handle the drivers and interpretation.
What do you guys think of this? (Skip past the intro)
And neoredstone, that is definitely true. The thing is that if I can hook the trackpad up in a way directly to the computer so that it shows up as an external mouse, that would solve my problem too.
