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TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
- jahantech 1y agoThis is exactly why normal people call us geeks "weird". Keep bringing on the cool stuff!
- mikpanko 1y agoVery cool. Curious: what is the minimum and maximum weight MacBook's trackpad can reliably measure this way?
- alden5 1y agoIt goes in gram increments and my laptop was able to read 7300g pressing as hard as i could, which I was surprised it would be designed to read that high, might go up to 10kg but I don't want to crack my trackpad lol. The actual measurements though are extremely unreliable. I've found it can't reliably measure anything, measuring a roll of tape gave me measurements from 70g to 700g, it always settled on a number but was different every time. Maybe the underlying data is more accurate but this API is definitely just designed for outputting the force of a finger. M1 MBP for reference
- cAtte_ 1y ago> pressing as hard as i could you are a brave one
- fnord77 1y agoWhat's the weight range it can handle? no mention of it and I don't want to dig through code
- projektfu 1y agoCould it be used to provide gait analysis for your pet mouse?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- subdev 1y agoHow does one come up with this idea?
- pavon 1y agoI love this, such a creative hack, and the wonderful irony that it only works when one has their finger on the scale. * Not legal for trade outside of Ankh-Morpork.
- koiueo 1y agoFinally, some actually useful usage scenario for that oversized trackpad
- byyoung3 1y agogreat work
- skyboo 1y agoReminds me of this from when I had an HDD Macbook https://uri.cat/software/LiquidMac/ https://uri.cat/software/LiquidMac/
- jojohohanon 1y agoI was a bit frustrated that the expected precision wasn’t on the main summary screen. Does anyone know?
- mrheosuper 1y agoOT, but this is what i love about apple laptop. They care about small detail, the detail that won't be on spec sheet for advertising. Like their laptop speaker is superior to any other machine, even premium laptop like xps or surface won't even come close. Or their huge trackpad but still accurate. I wish other manufacturers copy this from Apple.
- grantcarthew 1y agohttps://github.com/grantcarthew/notes/blob/main/macOS/Rant.md https://github.com/grantcarthew/notes/blob/main/macOS/Rant.m...
- conflictracker 1y agoBest repo I discovered this month. I love this kind of stuff.
- markstos 1y agoIf you are backpacking with your Macbook, this saves you from also needing to pack a kitchen scale.
- ferbass 1y agoThis is a clever idea, well done!
- robthebrew 1y ago[flagged]
- benoau 1y agoThere used to be iPhone apps that did something similar - https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625340/iphone-6s-gravity-app-digital-scales https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625340/iphone-6s-gravit...
- Dban1 1y ago3D touch was god tier for FPS games on iOS
- ashertrockman 1y agoIf anyone happens to be using an iPhone 6S... http://touchscale.co/ http://touchscale.co/
- hackmiester 1y agoThis worked all the way up through the iPhone Xs.
- fouc 1y agoiPhone 6s and 6s Plus (2015) - First to introduce 3D Touch iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (2016) iPhone 8 and 8 Plus (2017) iPhone X (2017) iPhone XS and XS Max (2018) - Last models with 3D Interesting that the iPhone SE 2nd/3rd generation with iPhone 8 form factor do not have 3D touch but "Haptic touch" instead.
- jmb99 1y agoThe single most irritating killed feature from Apple. Redesign half of their UI to rely on 3D Touch to make sense, then get rid of 3D Touch without redesigning the UI. Previewing links, moving the cursor, interacting with items, they’re all “press and hold until haptic feedback” instead of “quickly press hard and get immediate feedback.” Easier to accidentally trigger, slower to trigger on purpose.
- bagels 1y agoI hated when my mother in law came to me for help using her iPhone. She had a hard time controlling and understanding 3d touch.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoVery cool, but I'd still probably just buy a cheap digital scale.
- raldi 1y agoThe best digital scale is the one you have with you ;)
- j45 1y agoOne less thing to carry.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI used to travel with one of these[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
- amelius 1y agoThat thing will break your scale.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoYup. Extra batteries were also necessary.
- tln 1y agoNo download link?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI think it's a DIY project.
- addandsubtract 1y agoDIY projects can't be downloaded?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoBy "downloaded," I expect that you mean "Built, tested, and deployed." It's not an App Store app. It's basically a technology demo. Get Xcode, and build it and run it.
- lucasoshiro 1y agoA .dmg or at least a CLI instruction would really help
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoYou could always request that from the author. Since it's a Mac app, they could do that. Not so, if it were an iOS app. It's a pretty basic SwiftUI app. They haven't really polished it, so I could see why they might not be interested in making it much more accessible. It's a tool for Mac geeks. Speaking for myself, I have a whole bunch of packages, and almost every one has a test harness. Many of the test harnesses are "full-fat" iOS apps, so they can't be provided as releases, unless I create an App Store app for each one. They need to be built and run. A couple are Mac apps, but the whole deal with them, is that they are test harnesses, so divorcing them from the IDE is sort of negating their purpose. They are meant to help other Apple developers to understand and use the packages the apps are associated with.
- qwertytyyuu 1y agoAh I remember being able to do this with the iPhone 6s
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoI think this is neat, but only in a Rube Goldberg machine sort of way. The instructions are: 1. Open the scale 2. Rest your finger on the trackpad 3. While mainting finger contact, put your object on the trackpad 4. Try and put as little pressure on the trackpad while still maintaining contact. This is the weight of your object That is, the pressure sensors only work if it detects capacitance, so you need to be touching the track pad (but not too much!!) while weighing something.
- whycome 1y agoCan’t you get capacitance with a wet sponge? Like your typical dish cellulose sponge. You could make a small platform?
- asimovDev 1y agoI remember drawing on my old iPad back in the day by shoving a wet q-tip into a BIC pen and using it as a stylus. I am sure something similar could be rigged here
- dotancohen 1y agoI've used carrots and cucumbers as a capacitive stylus while wearing gloves. It's the reason why I love Note and S Ultra phones - the stylus. I'm using it now.
- doubled112 1y agoThe recipe was on your phone/tablet and there was no way you were taking your gloves off?
- dotancohen 1y agoNice. No, I preemptively armed myself with a carrot before taking the dog for a walk in cold weather. I only had a non-stylus smartphone for a year and a half before whimpering back to the Note series. It's what keeps me in the Samsung sphere of influence.
- pmxi 1y agoThis is clever! and potentially useful too. Have you done any testing to determine how precise and accurate this is? I suspect their must be a lot of variance between laptops, since this isn’t an intended use case.
- alden5 1y agoThe app isn't accurate at all, magic 8-ball of scales, anything you put on the trackpad it'll settle on a weight and give you a number but it'll be random. The app will accurately tell you how much force you're applying with a finger but when putting something else on it'll settle on a random number
- mschuster91 1y ago> I suspect their must be a lot of variance between laptops, since this isn’t an intended use case. Yeah and so it is for ordinary strain gauges aka load cells. You can either use a 2 point calibration (aka no load followed by known load) or if you want more precision a 3 point calibration. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_cell
- cluckindan 1y agoI would assume Apple hardware comes precalibrated. Homogeneity is everything for their product lines, down to individual calibration of screens and audio hardware. It would be weird to get a new laptop and have its trackpad feel different.
- hbn 1y agoThey have a setting for adjusting the pressure needed to activate a click. I wonder if that affects this app at all.
- elif 1y ago[flagged]
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago> 3rd party application to keep your computer from falling asleep Type `caffeinate` into the terminal, your mac will stay awake until you ctrl+c it
- makeitdouble 1y agoIt's a lot more fiddly than that. I remember trying a bunch until finding some combination that worked, and looking around it sounds like it's still a common issue: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/475477/caffeinate-doesnt-work-on-macbook-pro-with-lid-closed https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/475477/caffeinate-...
- pratyahava 1y agofor personal use i created a LaunchDaemon to keep `caffeinate -s` running all the time /Library/LaunchDaemons/ze.caffeinate.plist <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>ze.caffeinate</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/usr/bin/caffeinate</string> <string>-s</string> </array> <key>KeepAlive</key> <true/> </dict> </plist>
- hbn 1y ago> 3rd party application to keep your computer from falling asleep Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Hot corners -> set one to "Disable Screen Saver" Then just shove your cursor into that corner whenever you want to leave your computer without it sleeping
- yonatan8070 1y agoThe finger contact requirement seems rather logical when you consider that it's a touchpad, why bother processing force inputs when there's no touch?
- DonHopkins 1y agoJust what I need to roll the quantitative doobie.
- qoez 1y agoApparantely on safari there's touch strength so this should be possible to make for the web too, cool
- ashertrockman 1y agoSomebody could use this as a starting point. http://touchscale.co/ http://touchscale.co/ You'd have to collect new data on touch strength vs. weight to get the regression parameters. (If you do this, let me know and I can add it to the site above, and then we can both delight in the surprisingly large amount of unmonetizable traffic it gets.)
- thrownawaysz 1y agoCan someone compile a binary? Don't want to download Xcode just for that...
- incanus77 1y agoThis reminds me of how, twenty years ago, I used the PowerBook’s hard drive vibration sensor to rig up a seismograph to measure construction noise: https://allthegooddomainsweretaken.justinmiller.io/2007/04/04/allegro-never-misses-a-beat/ https://allthegooddomainsweretaken.justinmiller.io/2007/04/0...
- dtgriscom 1y agoI wrote that software, called SeisMac. Someone figured out the Apple-private API for the Sudden Motion Sensor that parks your laptop's hard drive if it detects free-fall. Working from that, I wrote a free app that used the API to show three-axis acceleration graphs. I was proudest of the calibration utility, which had you tip your laptop on its side (with properly rotated dialogs!), and then on its screen. People would send me recordings from all over the world (e.g. on a ship in the Drake Passage showing enormous surges). It was a lot of fun, and I even got an educational grant to improve it. Big bummer when Apple switched to solid-state drives (well, a bummer for my one small reason...) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor
- incanus77 1y agoAwesome, the name rings a bell now! Thanks for that. Honestly didn't remember the software involved (nowadays, I'd mention it in the blog post).
- tonymillion 1y agoThe best use of the SMS in the MacBook… or should I say SMACKbook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw
- bitwize 1y agoReminds me of the people who used their ThinkPad's vibration sensor to detect smacks on the machine, and rigged their X window manager to switch virtual desktops when smacked from the appropriate side, panning right when smacked on the left, and left when smacked on the right.
- xyst 1y ago[flagged]
- theyknowitsxmas 1y agoApple would've made an app a long time ago but would get sued after someone put a tire on it.
- mrexroad 1y agoI can already picture the Reddit post of an inverted aeropress brew fail while using trackpad as scale.
- mig39 1y agoVery cool, Krish! Hi from Fort McMurray! I'm going to use this project as an example for a Computer Science class.
- crunchychestnut 1y ago[dead]
- crunchychestnut 1y ago[dead]
- ynniv 1y agoFinally some hacker news
- ivanjermakov 1y ago> TrackWeight utilizes the Open Multi-Touch Support library by Takuto Nakamura to gain private access to all mouse and trackpad events on macOS. This library provides detailed touch data including pressure readings that are normally inaccessible to standard applications. How can something be available as a library but not as a native interface? Swift does not expose that API?
- bri3d 1y agoMac OS has "Private Frameworks" - shared libraries that are used by the system but don't ship with headers by default. It's trivial to produce these headers from the libraries, and then make wrappers for them like OpenMultitouchSupport which is a wrapper for MultitouchSupport.framework.
- jordanmorgan10 1y agoBack when we had 3D Touch, there was UIForce which did this. I still lament the loss of 3D Touch to this day :-(
- volemo 1y agoIt was such a useful feature! I mourn it every time I try to save a picture from Google and iOS selects nonexistent text around it. :(
- arm32 1y agoI must not use this for weed, I must not use this for weed, I must not use this for weed
- dmd 1y agoWhy not?
- arm32 1y agoThe sticky icky would completely destroy my beautiful, black M3 MBP.
- flotzam 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weighing_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weighing_paper
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y agoWeed can be sticky depending on the strain/harvest/cure time
- crunchychestnut 1y ago[dead]