TouchCanvas turns a laptop touchpad into a drawing surface for a DIY capacitive stylus.
The project reads touchpad HID reports, interprets the stylus contact, and translates it into input for a virtual pen device that drawing applications can recognise. The goal is to let the user draw with a real stylus on the touchpad without requiring a graphics tablet.
Built with Rust on Windows using raw HID input from a Windows Precision Touchpad. The project does not use machine-learning palm rejection: the input device is intended to be a stylus, and the focus is low-latency touch-to-pen translation.
The intended drawing workflow is:
DIY stylus → touchpad HID reports → decoded contact data
→ virtual HID pen device → drawing application
The system should also be able to suppress or prevent ordinary mouse movement while drawing mode is active. A future Figma-oriented mode may replace the current workflow of holding the left mouse button while swiping over the touchpad. Mode switching and its user experience will be designed later; the initial implementation will focus on the input pipeline. A dedicated app or command for enabling and disabling drawing mode is also planned for a later stage.
Work in progress — final year CS thesis project.
- Windows 10 or 11
- A laptop with a Windows Precision Touchpad
- A DIY capacitive stylus
- Rust toolchain (rustup.rs)
cargo run