Question

Most of touchpads on laptops don’t handle multitouch, hence are not able to send swipe gestures to the OS.

Would it be possible to send some gestures to Windows from an external device, like a Teensy, or a recent Arduino, that can already emulate a keyboard and a mouse. I could send buttons 4 and 5 (mouse wheel up and down), but I would like to send a real swipe gesture (for example with a flex sensor…).

Answer 1

One of the ways that you could work with arduino and similar is to use the Microsoft .NET Microframework, which is an open source code, available for no cost from: Micro Framework

There are other frameworks available for the Artuino that you might want to use. So if you have a great idea on how to utilize the sensor hardware, then the output must meet certain specifications.

To be able to connect to your hardware that reads gestures, you will need to understand how drivers are created, so take a look at this: Info on drivers.

To find that type of information you would need to take a look at above link, this is for sensors, which would appear to be not quite what you are looking for, you are looking to use “gestures” but first you have to be able to make the connection to your device, this guide MIGHT help. I have reviewed it for other reasons.

There is a bunch of stuff to dig through, but first of all, imo, is to understand how to get your software to communicate with Windows 8. Let me know if you have any other questions. I am not the best person, you might want to refer to the community at the Micro Framework link shown above.

Good luck.