Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware (2018)

The bonding process adds a bit more cost.

I use a mouse most of the time but when I have to press buttons on dialog boxes it's easier to raise my hand from the keyboard and push the button. Same for touching a window a raise or above the others.

The size of the button or the exposed size of the window make the difference. There must be plenty of space or mistouches kill the experience. Resizing windows is something I do only with the mouse.

A hybrid approach, mouse/touchpad and touchscreen is the best IMHO. If my next laptop has a touchscreen option I'll buy it.

Of course even 4 years after the Windows 10 launch you still have the new UWP settings app and the old Control Panel. It's a bit of a mess.

That's the mentality I'm challenging here. Mentally you don't account for the cost of your time, but from an outside perspective, you're spending it all the same.

That you have to factor in the price of labor with DIY electronics is the main reason you don't see more of those easy electronics projects available as some off-the-shelf contained product (where's my IoT API-accessible thermometer for $10!!!???).

I actually did something similarly stupid in college; for an embedded development class, my team needed a final project. I proposed a hat for the blind, with distance sensors and buzzers on the inside to inform distance from the walls and such. We also used black conductive thread on a black hat, so it was impossible to work with except for the girl who threaded it in the first place.

Easily the professor's favorite project, and I guess he still uses it as an example for future projects (and at some point he had some team extending it into some kind backpack?)

Later a friend working at a retail store selling products for the disabled contacted me about the project; apparently his boss was interested.

What no one acknowledged is that blind people are not walking into walls... the cane is far more practical, efficient and effective tool than this thing could ever be.

I had meant it to be a joke.

Also depending on the bus being used cameras often compress the image using JPEG to reduce the bandwith (very common with USB cameras, I doubt that the Mac camera does that).

Then on a computer you have the latency of whatever pipeline is being used and how much buffering is involved. For instance since typically the display doesn't run exactly synchronized with the camera you'll have some frames that'll end up "stuck" waiting for the monitor's vsync. If the app then does some internal buffering on top of that you can very easily reach a noticeable amount of latency.

In general you can consider than anything above 100ms is easily noticeable and that's only 3 frames at 30fps and 6 at 60, it's really not that much when you consider the complexity of modern video capture pipelines.

A pipeline might look something like demosaicing -> denoising -> light/exposure adjustment -> tone mapping -> encoding

Some of these steps will likely have hardware support (e.g. demosaicing, encoding) some won't. You may carry a few frames around for denoising, e.g. You have to sync up with the display at some point. Some of the steps might change order too, depending on what you are trying to do and what hardware support you have.

I haven't looked at available hardware specs recently. You used to be able to get very basic capture cameras that offloaded nearly everything to the computer - so that would give you minimal latency on the capture side (limited by your communication channel obviously); However keeping a stable image as resolution and frame rate grow is really hard that way, eventually impossible without a realtime system. More modern cameras are going to do much of that on board.