Inspiration
We've always wanted to use Microsoft Surfacebooks, but we've been stuck with MacBooks at work. That's we decided to make an affordable hardware hack that brings amazing touchscreen capabilities to the MacBook and integrates with your existing workflows.
What it does
Turn any laptop into a touchscreen device (with only $5 worth of hardware).
How we built it
Using object detection algorithms and homography we are able to detect when a user taps the screen. We created the hardware component with household items that total to less than $5.
Challenges we ran into
We were having difficulties with calibrating our touch detection algorithms. But after tweaking hyperparameters and using Microsoft Azure for compute we were able to create a seamless experience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Enabling touchscreen on a MacBook with less than $5 worth of hardware was an amazing accomplishment for us. Figuring out how to detect finger clicks with just a mirror and OpenCV was a really interesting problem to solve.
What we learned
We learned how to use Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines for additional compute. Really saved our hack :)
What's next for MacinTouch
A sleeker hardware design that can be mass produced and is easily portable.
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