Introduction: DIY Macbook Pro Tablet
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About: Making Stuff since the 80's
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This was my attempt at building a useable macbook pro tablet style device
The experience of using it was overall good. The 2 downsides to the tablet was the lack of muilt-touch support of the touch screen and the weight.
How it was built
What I did was to take a 17inch macbook pro take it apart.
Place the screen upside down on top of the keyboard.
On top of the screen I place a egalax touch screen which I brought from eBay.
Below are 2 video one showing the tablet been used with some more info
And the 2nd video is showing the basic build of the tablet
As you can see if you look at the picture I Tried different cases one made out of wood and the other out of aluminium. While the wood was light it wasn't every strong the aluminium on the other hand had the opposite problem while very strong was heavy, adding 1.1kg to the overall weight of the already heavy 17inch laptop.
The device it self was good and I used it for about 6 months mainly for watching TV and films.
The main problem I had was the OS interface wasn't design to be used with a large pointing device like a finger, so some of the smaller controls like the scroll bars and the close buttons where hard to oprate, I got around this by writing some apple scrips for changing the volume, screen brightness and closing the active window and scrolling. The laptop as a sensor in to check for movement I used this sensor to make a script which change the orientation of the screen a little like the iPad.
The iPad is a deviced that is design to be used with a touch interface OSX at the time was not and it shows when you try to use it as one. I would like to try with a macbook air and a copy of lion to make another mac tablet and see if ios and mac os are on the same lines.
The experience of using it was overall good. The 2 downsides to the tablet was the lack of muilt-touch support of the touch screen and the weight.
How it was built
What I did was to take a 17inch macbook pro take it apart.
Place the screen upside down on top of the keyboard.
On top of the screen I place a egalax touch screen which I brought from eBay.
Below are 2 video one showing the tablet been used with some more info
And the 2nd video is showing the basic build of the tablet
As you can see if you look at the picture I Tried different cases one made out of wood and the other out of aluminium. While the wood was light it wasn't every strong the aluminium on the other hand had the opposite problem while very strong was heavy, adding 1.1kg to the overall weight of the already heavy 17inch laptop.
The device it self was good and I used it for about 6 months mainly for watching TV and films.
The main problem I had was the OS interface wasn't design to be used with a large pointing device like a finger, so some of the smaller controls like the scroll bars and the close buttons where hard to oprate, I got around this by writing some apple scrips for changing the volume, screen brightness and closing the active window and scrolling. The laptop as a sensor in to check for movement I used this sensor to make a script which change the orientation of the screen a little like the iPad.
The iPad is a deviced that is design to be used with a touch interface OSX at the time was not and it shows when you try to use it as one. I would like to try with a macbook air and a copy of lion to make another mac tablet and see if ios and mac os are on the same lines.
