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ALPS Touchpad driver with VoodooInput


skyrilhd

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I thought long about making a post about an unfinished driver. But here we go.

 

This ALPS driver is a more updated version from Dr. Hurt's kext. It allows using VoodooInput which is a Magic Trackpad II emulator. This means one can use all native gestures in macOS. I've never had a MacBook with multitouch support, so the gesture thing was a new thing to me. But after using these gestures, I cannot tell how impressed I am.

 

Since Dr. Hurt's last contribution was around the beginning of 2017, I decided to port VoodooInput to ALPS, as the driver is, at this point, very out of date and the calculation in the kext is not the best (I always had weird issues with it). The reason is also that I want to learn C++. After trial-and-erroring, I managed to get VoodooInput to work (thanks to usr-sse2) on my E7250 with V7. This was mainly done as a "proof of concept" to show that it was possible. But doing so, I learned so much that I decided to maintain the kext for a while. This is the beginning of the driver. There is still more to be done. Since the kext is very old, the VoodooPS2Controller kext lacks the improvements that are available in the acidanthera repo. I will try merging the VoodooPS2 improvements from acidanthera with the ALPS driver and go on from there. But the limitation comes with an inexperienced C++ developer :P. Any developer is welcome to improve the driver even more.

 

V1-V6 have partial support and need testing.

 

Any contribution to the project would be great!

 

Current plans:
- As I said, I want to merge the VoodooPS2 kext from acidanthera with the current driver and after the driver is finished merge it again with acidanthera to make it more uniform.
- I want to support more trackpads (Currently I'm trying to get V8 working as it never worked with Dr. Hurt's kext).

 

Features:

- supports V1, V2 and V6 as a normal mouse

- supports V3, V4 and V5 (not tested yet)

- supports V7 (Everything works, three finger drag is a bit unstable though)

- supports V8

- supports all native gestures

- synced with the latest acidanthera VoodooPS2 repo

- compatible from 10.11

 

Other versions:
For other unsupported versions of ALPS, I've published a kext that has improved scrolling (thanks to 1Revenger1 and icedman): https://github.com/SkyrilHD/VoodooPS2-ALPS/releases/tag/1.0.0

 

Source code:

https://github.com/SkyrilHD/VoodooPS2-ALPS

 

Latest release:

https://github.com/SkyrilHD/VoodooPS2-ALPS/releases

 

Credits:

- Dr. Hurt (for the initial driver)

- 1Revenger1 (for updating VoodooPS2-ALPS)

- usr-sse2 (for the Synaptics code which the ALPS driver uses)

- acidanthera team (for further improvements to the driver)

 

Hopefully, I did not forget anything to mention.

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Hi, thanks for your contributions. I am using an E5470 with a V8 trackpad. I tried the latest version from your repository but the trackpad is not even recognized by the system. I'm looking forward to your next improvements. 

image.png.00e2cd0c32295c1e2431048904291ae7.png

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Hey, your latest version works fine with most features. However, it still has some shortcomings such as: the mouse nub does not work (it works well with Rehabman's version), the scrolling speed with two fingers is a bit slow and the touchpad does not work after the device sleeps and wakes up. I hope you can improve these shortcomings in the next version.

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Same findings for E7470 Alps v8. The track stick does not work. 2 finger detection is fine but not 3 fingers or more while using fingermgmt.app

After sleep / Wake, touchpad stopped responding. 

When using an USB mouse, the tracking and scrolling work but left mouse doesn't work so a restart is needed to work again.

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