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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 i

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).

j-pb 6y ago
Absolutely amazing! 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!
- Solder_Man 6y ago
  > 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.

j-pb 6y ago

Absolutely amazing! 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!

Solder_Man 6y ago
> 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.