After years of keeping it for no reason I decided to through out my (broken) old 486DX4 laptop. As I always do I took it apart first to see what’s in there Turns out the
MAXDATA FT6000A “Acrobat”
has a YMF262 and a YAC512 on it. How cool is that? ;D
Hehe, it’s not really a collector’s item. There’s tons of them on ebay for ~20 bucks each. Besides, when I said “broken” I meant “broken”. Display contrast is so low you can’t see anything, hdd is broken, bios battery screwed, battery dead, ram died, fdd drive only accepts floppies it formatted itself (but no other computer accepts those ;-)), case cracked, broken keys… It’s been though a lot even before I got it ;D FIxing it was out of the question - the battery pack still costs 150€, the RAM another 50€ and so on… I think it would like to be put to good use by supplying parts for a good cause.
Most of that stuff makes little difference… maybe the casing could be of use, maybe ram is dead but individual IC’s or OK, etc… you never know what half-working machine some geek has, and what parts he needs to complete it But…
I don’t suppose you could pull the firmware from that PIC controlling the touchpad??
Maybe it could give some pointers as to how to build a MIDI touchpad controller, I know that’s definitely something that i’d be enormously interested in.
I’ve no idea how hard it is, but i’ve yet to come across a decent project for a DIY MIDI touchpad, not least of which one that uses recycled laptop parts!
If such a project existed, i’d be building a few for sure.
I’ve no idea how hard it is, but i’ve yet to come across a decent project for a DIY MIDI touchpad
Step 1) Get touchpads
I toyed with a screen I got once, was the touchscreen for a cassiopaeia (or however you spell it), just had two resistances for X and Y, same deal seems to be the standard for touchscreens and touchpads. I know that capacitative touchpads/screens exist, so keep that in mind when finding a candidate. Resistive should be much easier to use w/ midibox. Then you can plug it into the AINs and convert the received position to a value. Easy! (in theory, heh). Just carry your meter to the scrap laptop, and connect it up to the wires and move your finger around and see whet happens…
Someone mentioned a touchpad recently that they got stuck on because the X and Y axis ran diagonally from corner to corner, but that shouldn’t be a big stumbling block.
Turns out the
