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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
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(originally developed at: https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/)
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.
I've dreamed of using a stylus and tablet since reading _The Mote in God's Eye_ when I was young, and have preferred to use them since using a "Koalapad" attached to a Commodore 64 in the school computer lab when I was young.
The NCR-3125 I had was donated to The Smithsonian by the guy I sold it to, along w/ a lot of other materials on pen computing --- PenPoint was my favourite OS alongside NeXTstep, and the high-watermark of my computing experience was using the NCR running PenPoint as a portable, then cabling it up to my NeXT Cube to transfer data --- had a Wacom ArtZ attached to the Cube, so still had a stylus, just it wasn't a screen.
Futurewave Smartsketch is still my favourite drawing program, and I was very glad that its drawing system made its way through Flash and into Freehand/MX (which I still use by preference and despair of replacing). If you have a graphics tablet, be sure to try out:
Hopefully the folks making Graphite will figure out that it's a core functionality for a drawing program to work w/ a graphics tablet --- haven't been able to do anything when I've tried.
I sketch (either on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ or Kindle Scribe or Wacom One or Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360), take notes (mostly on the Scribe), do block-programming (Wacom One or Book 3), or draw (on the Book 3).
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. Anyon…
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. Anyon…
I’m going to go against the standard advice of this book or that course. Pick up (broken) equipment and start disassembling it to figure out how they turn A into B [1]. Go down the rabbit hole of hunting down the service manual of the thing or one of its siblings. Look at how the pcbs follow the same pattern in competing design. Look at how all the yamaha, sony, medion, … amplifier/tuners are made in the same way and…
You can build a micro-controller with a circuit that controls a stepper motor. Let the motor do something simple/fun. Connect the fun doohikie to give feedback to the microcontroller — e.g. using some kind of an encoder chip that converts motor's rotation amount to numbers that will tell the microcontroller how much to move, initialize the doohikie's start state.
But you can understand a lot more if you don't use the HBridge chip for the motor. Build the bridge circuit yourself. Build your own power supply for the microcontroller too(if you want to).
You can pick a path to go down on and focus on specific parts:
1. For the h bridge there is lots to learn. Designing the operational amp for D2A conversion as well as amplification/signal modeling — which you will need for the motor for current limiting in the h bridge per motor spec for the doohickie you want to power — That will teach you quite a bit about analog electronics and design. What kind of currents you need to protect and how e.g. using opto electronics. Limiting noise from power supply and parasitic noise so that your circuit does not misfire. You will likely need a set up of an oscilloscope, soldering irons and breadboards to prototype. Learn some basics from a book about design then go back to the circuit and build.
2. If you build your own PCB for this. It is a multi month project. You can learn a out CAD and chip layout. But I think you can do this in parts for example you can design the initial PCB only for the digital components and then connect it to a breadboard where you can prototype the H bridge you want.
3. If you choose to learn digital design and embedded system programming then maybe you can build the tougher analog parts for motor control using store-bought components and chips and focus mostly on the programming the microcontroller. That is a totally legitimate part too. You could use an old MCS-51 microcontroller and learn about data and program memory addressing and interrupt handling from scratch.
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, no…
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.
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. Anyon…
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 t…
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, no…
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 pos…
Basically:
- Pen click is useless for osu! or can just be digital, while artists would want analog pressure
- Buttons on a pen are actively detrimental for osu! but very useful for artists
- Smoothing on a tablet is more detrimental for osu! the more of it there is but absolutely necessary for artists
- High polling rate is useless for artists (they would have input delay due to the smoothing they need either way) but very useful for osu!
- Big tablets are useless for osu! players as they typically only use a 5-15cm area while they are very useful for artists
I think the entire point of something like pompyboard is to make a tablet just for osu!, which doesn’t exist right now. Meanwhile for artists there is already a whole industry of tablets available for them