Larger touchpad

General
1

Been a month using the touchpad and I like it! But I want it to be bigger!!! Much larger surface area than whats available now. And I think its possible to have lets say 4x3 inches large touchpad dongle. We have space to do it.

Can we please do it? Any DIY folks doing something like this?

3 Likes
2

Thanks for your suggestion! It’s a recurring one, and I think we’ll release a larger touchpad module eventually, but it’s not high on our list and possibly take years.

The firmware and Agent should work for a larger touchpad module, assuming you’re using the same touchpad sensor IC. The electronic design is open, which should provide a good starting point for a redesigned PCB.

The Azoteq IQS ICs have a free GUI tool that can be used to reconfigure the rows and columns of the enlarged sensor matrix. We may be able to help with CAD if someone gets this far.

3

Speaking of the azoteq ic, I’d be interesting in knowing if implementing macOS’s pinch to zoom and even some gestures would be possible somehow. The spect sheet does mention 150 channels so I assume that easily translates to at least 5 finger detection, I unfortunately have 0 experience in hardware and low level software dev. In the mean time I’ll take a look at the trackpad’s firmware source code.

4

We don’t know yet how USB pinch-to-zoom can be implemented via USB.

1 Like
5

I love this keyboard and being able to get a bigger trouchpad would definitely make my life easier.
But I am a hardware newbie, where can I start exploring to gauge the efforts required here?

6
  1. The touchpad size should be decided upon, and a mechanical CAD model must be created accordingly.
  2. Choose the specific Azoteq IQS IC according to the touch matrix size.
  3. Design the mechanical CAD of the new module case.
  4. Redesign the PCB.
  5. Program the IQS IC with Azoteq’s GUI tool.

Even with a working firmware, this project is far from trivial. If you don’t have relevant knowledge, you must be extremely perseverent to make it.

7

Would be great to get a larger touchpad module to emulate the feel of working on a laptop keyboard. I still use my laptop sometimes because of this simple convenience depending on the work I’m doing.