The Youtube introduction video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s) is a great explanation of the tech and the end where he retrofits it into a Panasonic CF RZ is wild.
As a software engineer, seeing hardware projects like this makes me want to go back to school and pick up a few electrical engineering courses. The hardware space just seems to unlock so much (honestly blown away with the LCD retrofit at the end of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s )
I've played with simple electronics on the arduino and raspberry pi platforms but this is a whole new level. Anyone gone down this path? Something you would recommend?
Before you dive too deep, check what's already available and let your tinker TODAY without having to solder anything. You can still do so, even design PCB and get them mailed to you (like I did, it's fun) but honestly spend a bit of time (and money) on CrowdSupply to see the plethora of fun and useful OSHW out there. IMHO only after having considered what's beyond the usual consumer electronics it is worth learning to build, not before.
I found that programming concepts map really well to digital electronics. The objects in your object oriented language are real objects with their own internal physical state. A large fraction of what embedded engineers do is just APIs and protocols.
Controversial opinion but you do not need to learn electronics to have a good time. One can have plenty of fun simply writing software and plugging prebuilt modules together on a breadboard. Ohm and Maxwell need not apply.
As an aside, anyone here uses drawing tablets for work? I got a cheap Wacom tablets and found it super useful, for sketching ideas or understanding something before starting to implement new code.
For the last few years, I have been using small Wacom Intuos S tablets as a replacement for mice, trackballs or touchpads.
I configure the tablets in the "Relative" mode, in which they behave exactly like a mouse, unlike in their default "Absolute" mode. I configure left click to be done by touching the tablet with the stylus and the 2 buttons that are on the stylus to generate right click and double left click.
The advantage over a mouse or trackball is the much more comfortable position of the hand and also the much higher speed and accuracy of positioning. Moving the pointer to any location on the screen is instantaneous and without any effort, due the lightness of the stylus and to the lack of contact with the tablet.
Because the stylus is extremely light, I can touch type on the keyboard while still keeping the stylus between my fingers. This allows faster transitions between keyboard and graphic pointer than with a standard mouse (because the time needed to grip the mouse is eliminated). Only when I type longer texts, I drop the stylus on the tablet.
The tablet is no bigger than a traditional mouse pad, so it does not need a bigger space on the desk.
After switching to use exclusively a graphic tablet, I would never want to use again a mouse, trackball, trackpoint or touchpad. I only regret that I have never thought earlier to try this.
Besides being a better mouse than a mouse, a tablet obviously allows to do things for which a mouse is inappropriate, e.g. drawing or handwriting (e.g. for signing a document).
I should mention that I have always used the Wacom tablets with Linux. I have never tried them on Windows, so I do not know if there they work as well.
Possibly not the use-case you're thinking of, but I've been using a Wacom Intuos tablet as a mouse replacement for a few years now on MacOS and on Linux. I use it in pen mode (where the area of the tablet maps to the screen) - you can also configure it in mouse mode (like a touchpad, where the movement is relative to where the cursor is on the screen) which should work better with multi-display setups, though it's not to my preference. I have my pen/stylus setup so that tapping it onto the tablet acts as a left/primary click, the larger button on the pen is right click, and holding the smaller button and dragging on the tablet is scroll/pan).
MacOS is well-supported once the drivers are installed, though sometimes the driver doesn't seem to pick up tablet (either after the laptop or tablet goes to sleep). Restarting the driver fixes this, though this bug seems to have been fixed in the latest driver release. Linux works out of the box (at least on KDE/Arch), though sadly customization support on Wayland isn't quite there yet compared with what you could do on X11 (with the xsetwacom utility). For drawing support though it should work perfectly but as far as I know you can't the the button functionality, which is a bummer when using it as a pointing device.
The main benefit for me is that it feels much more ergonomic compared with a regular mouse or even a vertical mouse or trackball and I don't get anywhere near as much wrist or shoulder pain - especially in the cold temps in the middle of winter where I am. There is a bit of an adjustment period and I find for interacting with small UI elements such as buttons it can be a bit tricky, but for me the benefits outweigh the downsides. The only other downside I can think of is that when using the tablet over bluetooth (wired is also an option and tracks a little more smoothly) the battery only lasts 1½ days compared with the weeks/months a wireless mouse would go for.
I'm an artist and haven't used a mouse since somewhere in the 00's when I developed some RSI in my index finger while working in the Flash animation mines.
Annoyances: games that require you to push the cursor against the edge of the screen to move the view, app/website developers who force tiny scrollbars that constantly hide themselves despite me setting the OS to never hide scrollbars, having to restart the tablet drivers most of the time when I move between having the laptop docked with the big screen and big tablet on the desk, and taking it out to a cafe or the park and using the smaller tablet that lives in my laptop bag.
This seems very similar to another open-source tablet effort, which went a step further and designed a Hall effect sensor-based tablet: https://github.com/pompyboard/pompyboard
The creator of it has showcased the prototype at an osu!* streamer's channel (since low-latency absolute positioning devices are highly desired for playing osu!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1afJ7OpacU
* that is osu! (sic) rhythm game, not to be confused with OSU universities
Has it actually reached properly functional state?
The showcase video didn't look very convincing and neither website nor the discord channel contained a lot more information. Although I didn't dig through discord history too carefully.
It's one thing to hook up 200 hall effect sensors to a MCU, and read few of them or send data over HID at 8000Hz. It's different thing to read all 200 at 8000Hz and figure out the position with reasonable resolution and accuracy.
Can it also detect the exact moment pen touches tablet or additional button clicks? Or does it require taping keyboard with other hand? Which is probably fine for OSU, but less so for drawing.
Some of Wacom's tablets can be used with both the pen or with your finger (acting like a touchpad).
Anyone have any idea whether the touchpad part could be made open-source? Or even some closed sourced off-the-shelf solution that could be integrated with the above?
EDIT: There is a Canadian company that has recently released an open source trackpad called the Ploopy Trackpad [1].
26 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] threadAnd then yeah he's playing a Touhou rearrangement in the project intro video. "Original: ZUN".
I wholeheartedly support weebs who create useful open-source electronics and share them with the world.
I've played with simple electronics on the arduino and raspberry pi platforms but this is a whole new level. Anyone gone down this path? Something you would recommend?
Controversial opinion but you do not need to learn electronics to have a good time. One can have plenty of fun simply writing software and plugging prebuilt modules together on a breadboard. Ohm and Maxwell need not apply.
Anyway I'd be interested in the implementation of a 3D mouse also.
I configure the tablets in the "Relative" mode, in which they behave exactly like a mouse, unlike in their default "Absolute" mode. I configure left click to be done by touching the tablet with the stylus and the 2 buttons that are on the stylus to generate right click and double left click.
The advantage over a mouse or trackball is the much more comfortable position of the hand and also the much higher speed and accuracy of positioning. Moving the pointer to any location on the screen is instantaneous and without any effort, due the lightness of the stylus and to the lack of contact with the tablet.
Because the stylus is extremely light, I can touch type on the keyboard while still keeping the stylus between my fingers. This allows faster transitions between keyboard and graphic pointer than with a standard mouse (because the time needed to grip the mouse is eliminated). Only when I type longer texts, I drop the stylus on the tablet.
The tablet is no bigger than a traditional mouse pad, so it does not need a bigger space on the desk.
After switching to use exclusively a graphic tablet, I would never want to use again a mouse, trackball, trackpoint or touchpad. I only regret that I have never thought earlier to try this.
Besides being a better mouse than a mouse, a tablet obviously allows to do things for which a mouse is inappropriate, e.g. drawing or handwriting (e.g. for signing a document).
I should mention that I have always used the Wacom tablets with Linux. I have never tried them on Windows, so I do not know if there they work as well.
When it doesn’t anymore I’ll need to get something else, probably an iPad so I can also use it as a 2nd screen.
MacOS is well-supported once the drivers are installed, though sometimes the driver doesn't seem to pick up tablet (either after the laptop or tablet goes to sleep). Restarting the driver fixes this, though this bug seems to have been fixed in the latest driver release. Linux works out of the box (at least on KDE/Arch), though sadly customization support on Wayland isn't quite there yet compared with what you could do on X11 (with the xsetwacom utility). For drawing support though it should work perfectly but as far as I know you can't the the button functionality, which is a bummer when using it as a pointing device.
The main benefit for me is that it feels much more ergonomic compared with a regular mouse or even a vertical mouse or trackball and I don't get anywhere near as much wrist or shoulder pain - especially in the cold temps in the middle of winter where I am. There is a bit of an adjustment period and I find for interacting with small UI elements such as buttons it can be a bit tricky, but for me the benefits outweigh the downsides. The only other downside I can think of is that when using the tablet over bluetooth (wired is also an option and tracks a little more smoothly) the battery only lasts 1½ days compared with the weeks/months a wireless mouse would go for.
Annoyances: games that require you to push the cursor against the edge of the screen to move the view, app/website developers who force tiny scrollbars that constantly hide themselves despite me setting the OS to never hide scrollbars, having to restart the tablet drivers most of the time when I move between having the laptop docked with the big screen and big tablet on the desk, and taking it out to a cafe or the park and using the smaller tablet that lives in my laptop bag.
The creator of it has showcased the prototype at an osu!* streamer's channel (since low-latency absolute positioning devices are highly desired for playing osu!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1afJ7OpacU
* that is osu! (sic) rhythm game, not to be confused with OSU universities
The showcase video didn't look very convincing and neither website nor the discord channel contained a lot more information. Although I didn't dig through discord history too carefully.
It's one thing to hook up 200 hall effect sensors to a MCU, and read few of them or send data over HID at 8000Hz. It's different thing to read all 200 at 8000Hz and figure out the position with reasonable resolution and accuracy.
Can it also detect the exact moment pen touches tablet or additional button clicks? Or does it require taping keyboard with other hand? Which is probably fine for OSU, but less so for drawing.
Anyone have any idea whether the touchpad part could be made open-source? Or even some closed sourced off-the-shelf solution that could be integrated with the above?
EDIT: There is a Canadian company that has recently released an open source trackpad called the Ploopy Trackpad [1].
[1] https://github.com/ploopyco/trackpad https://ploopy.co/trackpad/