[namdnay]

Could a small piece of conductive foam or some cleverly layered tin foil+paper work? So put the object on the shim (which has a known or even negligeable weight)

[acct-litter-al]

I once put some aluminum duct tape completely over the touch pad of an old laptop to see what would happen. Turns out it induced enough "eddy currents" to make the mouse move around the screen without me touching it--in a way, visualizing the currents!

I connected the foil to ground using a small strip of the tape to the ground metal of a USB port on the side and it disabled the touch pad.

[acct-litter-al]

Looking back, it would have been interesting to code up a program to record the movement of the mouse as a trail of pixels...

[svnt]

No, you need roughly a small human's worth of ground mass for most capacitive touch sensors to register a touch.

[stavros]

How do capacitive pens work?

[bigyikes]

Tape a wire to the trackpad and hold the wire?

[amelius]

ground mass?

[83]

Could probably make a small stand with nubbins from touch screen pens as the feet.