touchpad raw input

Question

I am researching the extra possibilities for using a laptop touchpad as an input device apart from mouse movement similar to this one: http://softarchive.net/blogs/tech-weki/number_pad_film_adds_a_number_pad_to_your_laptop.895113.html

How do I hook and listen to raw data coming from touchpad driver?

Answer 1

First, find your system's TouchPad driver, by
zgrep -i touchpad /var/log/dmesg*
On my system (yours may be different) it is
input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7
Doing
ls -lRA /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7
(Note the added /sys). showed some interesting files, but
man -k touchpad
led me to
man synaptics
which says:
synaptics - touchpad input driver
DESCRIPTION
synaptics is an Xorg input driver for touchpads. Even though touchpads can be
handled by the normal evdev or mouse drivers, this driver allows more advanced
features of the touchpad to become available.