Bought a cheap little USB touchscreen and learned the only(?) option for drivers on Mac costs $150 PER MACHINE. Made a little USB converter with a $1 microcontroller that remaps the touchscreen output to standard mouse/keyboard events understood by any computer. 🧵

Immediately I noticed this thing reported itself as an HID device, so I plugged it into one of my pedals to see if I could get any raw HID output to log. It did! The format was pretty obvious - each report contains (up to) five fingers X/Y positions.

I used TinyUSB to emulate mouse/keyboard, but instead of a standard mouse descriptor, I used one that reports absolute position. With touchscreen, you don't want relative movement - you want the cursor to go right where you touch. Got a descriptor from:

Then I used one of the @adafruit RP2040 USB host boards and the Arduino version of TinyUSB to glue everything together. Any RP2040 board will do, but this one's got the spare USB port built right in.

Cool things here: A) Nothing to install on your computer!! No janky ass daemons. B) you can write your own gesture detection and dispatch them as keyboard macros!

also shout out to my buds @ScopeCreepPod @lakesaintdaniel and Raffi for being front and center on my Spotify without any planning lol

Your casual flexes are so tremendous.

I'm just gluing stuff together!!

To clarify: Apple is not charging $150. A third party company is selling a driver for that much. I think anyone could theoretically make one. Lame that they don't offer anything but this isn't a case of their usual nickel/diming

You may have missed the entire point of going Mac in the first place. It's a status symbol - Paying that $150 is a sense of pride for Mac users. If you want something affordable / hackable, you should probably choose literally anything else ;D

This take is so played out. I've been failing driving Mac/win side by side for 20 years I don't need to hear what the "point" is 😝