Magic Trackpad using ten fingers and with gentoo linux support

I picked up a magic trackpad this past friday and decided to see what it was capable of under linux. The video above shows that the magic trackpad hardware provides a great deal of information to the host operating system. As I'd hoped it seems to be nearly as capable as a fingerworks igesture or touchpad in some regards. In the video you can see that the trackpad is able to: detect 10 fingers, track finger contact elliptical size (i.e. along two axes) and orientation, do all the above smoothly at a high sample rate.

The video was created by streaming the debugfs file entry corresponding to the trackpad into a pygame application. The pygame code parses the apple protocol packets to determine ellipse sizes, positions and orientations and then blits them to the screen on transparent surfaces. This code is by no means pretty, in fact "quick hack" is probably a better description. Any suggestions, enhancements, criticisms,etc. are welcome.

If you want to try the code below yourself, you first need to make sure you have debugfs set up properly. Assuming you enabled debugfs when building your kernel, make sure debugfs is mounted and if it's not, mount it with something like:
mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug/
Now, if you look in /sys/kernel/debug/hid/ you should see a directory whose name corresponds to the address of your magic trackpad. If you switch into this directory you'll see an events file which you can then read with cat, tail, or the python script below. Note that support for the magic trackpad is still in a very preliminary stage, so getting things working is fairly involved. I'll describe how to play around with the hardware at a low level in the description below.

First, start with a kernel new enough to have magic-mouse support. In my case, I chose gentoo-2.6.35-r5. Now grab the multitouch branch of Chase Douglas's debian git repository. You'll need to copy or merge several files from Chase's kernel source to your own:
/drivers/hid/hid-magicmouse.c
/drivers/hid/hid-core.c
/drivers/hid/hid-ids.h
possibly a few others

If you feel like using the same kernel as Chase, just skip straight to compiling his source tree. Once the kernel is built and you've booted into it, it's time to play around with the trackpad.

Depending on the version of bluez you're using, the procedure for pairing to an HID device will vary. In bluez 3.32 you would first set the trackpad as a trusted device using DBUS, which you could either do programmatically or using a graphical tool like d-feet to call the method
/org/bluez/hci0/org.bluez.Adapter.SetTrusted("bluetooth address of your trackpad").

Once the device is set as trusted you would need to actually setup a pairing as root:
passkey-agent --default 0000
then use d-feet or DBUS CLI to call CreateDevice("BluetoothAddress"). At this point if you call ListDevices() you should a new device corresponding to the trackpad.
Once you've paired with the trackpad and loaded the hid-magicmouse kernel module you should see messages in the system log indicating that a new input device has been registered.

input: Apple Wireless Trackpad as /class/input/input6
magicmouse 0005:05AC:030E.0005: input,hidraw4: BLUETOOTH HID v1.60 Mouse [Apple Wireless Trackpad] on 00:27:48:09:63:60
input: Apple Wireless Trackpad as /class/input/input7


Note that you'll also want an up to date installation of evdev, otherwise you might get messages like this:

evdev.c(EVIOCGBIT): Suspicious buffer size 511, limiting output to 64 bytes. See http://userweb.kernel.org/~dtor/eviocgbit-bug.html


If you want to see the touch reports the trackpad produces you can use the evtest application. In gentoo this is provided by the joystick ebuild. Now if you do

]$ evtest /dev/input/event6
Input driver version is 1.0.0
Input device ID: bus 0x5 vendor 0x5ac product 0x30e version 0x160
Input device name: "Apple Wireless Trackpad"
Supported events:
Event type 0 (Sync)
Event type 1 (Key)
Event code 272 (LeftBtn)
Event code 325 (ToolFinger)
Event code 330 (Touch)
Event code 333 (Tool Doubletap)
Event code 334 (Tool Tripletap)
Event code 335 (?)
Event type 3 (Absolute)
Event code 0 (X)
Value 3097
Min -2909
Max 3167
Event code 1 (Y)
Value 2238
Min -2456
Max 2565
Event code 48 (?)
Value 0
Min 0
Max 255
Event code 49 (?)
Value 0
Min 0
Max 255
Event code 52 (?)
Value 0
Min -32
Max 31
Event code 53 (?)
Value 0
Min -2909
Max 3167
Event code 54 (?)
Value 0
Min -2456
Max 2565
Event code 57 (?)
Value 0
Min 0
Max 15
Event type 4 (Misc)
Event code 3 (RawData)
Testing ... (interrupt to exit)


Now if you touch with two fingers you'll see a slew of output which should include something like:

Event: time 1283194689.870573, -------------- Config Sync ------------
Event: time 1283194689.870586, type 1 (Key), code 330 (Touch), value 0
Event: time 1283194689.870587, type 1 (Key), code 333 (Tool Doubletap), value 0
Event: time 1283194689.870589, -------------- Report Sync ------------