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Project Patchouli: Open-source electromagnetic drawing tablet hardware
- Guestmodinfo 9mo agoAwesome
- Guestmodinfo 9mo agoWhy negative points. Can I not say I'm happy he or she made this project. It's not for the internet. It's for the content poster only I wrote that I liked it. At that time I was the only poster. I didn't write first! I wrote awesome. Because I liked it. Don't assume that everything is for you the reader to read and not the poster to read
- Guestmodinfo 9mo agoI use a pen tablet daily for many years it's very very close to my heart and my work. Don't just assume sarcasm where it is none. Not everyone shares the same culture. Also why should I write a long swan song when a simple awesome is accurate and conveys everything I wanted to say
- lukan 9mo agoYou could have expressed that with a upvote. Text comments here are supposed to have more content. (And lamenting about downvotes has a high chance of getting more downvotes)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- fractallyte 9mo agoComments should add something worthwhile to the discussion. Redundant comments ("noise") tend to be downvoted. (I didn't downvote you!) If you meant for the comment to be read by the content poster, then something more meaningful than a single-word response would have been more appropriate. These are the rules and practices which have kept HN lean and functional over nearly two decades.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jmwilson 9mo agoThe Youtube introduction video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s 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.
- barishnamazov 9mo agoThe production quality of this video is almost too good to be true! Kudos to Yukidama!
- JuniperMesos 9mo agohttps://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Patchouli_Knowledge https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Patchouli_Knowledge And 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.
- packetlost 9mo agoI'm always happy when I see Touhou mentioned on HN. It's reasonably popular with a certain subset of hacker types that grew up in in the 2000s
- quijoteuniv 9mo agoBeautiful! Added to list of projects! Retrofit into screen of old 27» 2009 imac that is run by a raspberry and drived by a screen driver.
- maximgeorge 9mo ago[dead]
- ZiiS 9mo agoVery well written reverse engineering documents.
- hipaa_eng 9mo agoAs 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 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?
- Aromasin 9mo agoHonestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill. Spend some time working through that book. By the end of it, you'll have a better grasp of electronics than 90% of the engineers I've worked with, all who are EE bachelors/majors. It's a 3 month job at most, less if you do a dedicated hour a night. Then pick up some breadboard and parts, and build to your hearts content. Making a working circuit is honestly very easy once you know the basics. Look inside a Made in China knockoff appliance, and you'll see that most things can be made from a couple of conponents and a microcontroller. Pull apart an old TV remote or bluetooth device, and look up the part numbers and what they do. There's not much to it. You have to remember that most of the stuff getting designed and built in South East Asia is done by people with zero qualifications. Electronics being "the thing that smart university people do" in the West is mostly a mental block, culturally constructed because people don't want their kids getting electrocuted so bombard them with constant threat of death if playing with electricity (which mostly isn't a worry anymore unless you're working with mains power). The true discipline of Electronic Engineering is designing something that works for every eventuality and environment, with close to 100% reliability, at the very cutting edge of what is possible with the components we can afford while balancing physical and financial constraints. That's something which takes years of both academic study and industrial experience.
- 123pie123 9mo ago"Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill." very good recommendation, that book help me turn my studies in to reality electronic circuit emulators will help with the basics as well (eg https://www.falstad.com/circuit/ https://www.falstad.com/circuit/)
- amelius 9mo agoIsn't this technique encumbered by patents? Or have they expired? Anyway I'd be interested in the implementation of a 3D mouse also.
- jsheard 9mo agoWacoms key patents did expire which is why there's such strong competition in the tablet space now, and why prices have fallen through the floor. I wonder why Apple still uses active pens on the iPad when passive EMR has become such a commodity. Maybe it's just rent-seeking, a passive pen would probably be much easier to clone without paying Apples MFi fees.
- dhosek 9mo agoI think there’s also latency issues and some features possible with the active pen that wouldn’t be with passive technology, although I don’t know for sure.
- functionmouse 9mo agobecause they didn't make it, of course.
- random_duck 9mo agoThis is such a great project! I want one!
- random_duck 9mo agoI love the cute diagrams in the `Scan Rate Optimization` section.
- MORPHOICES 9mo ago[dead]
- BoredPositron 9mo agoNot everything is for everyone. The page is the equivalent to a printed manual with a loc.
- WillAdams 9mo agoThe thing is, documentation isn't a monolithic thing --- it really needs to be sub-divided/categorized into subsets which are useful to specific categories of folks working on, or working with, a project: https://diataxis.fr/ https://diataxis.fr/ (originally developed at: https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/ https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/)
- cbeach 9mo agoSomeone donate to this guy so he can upgrade his 20 y/o Thinkpad!
- coffeeaddict1 9mo agoAs 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.
- Aherontas 9mo agoI am doing exactly the same, also writing down some raw ideas I have in it to not forget them.
- WillAdams 9mo agoYes. 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: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ 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).
- adrian_b 9mo agoFor 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.
- skdjbfsglgnd 9mo ago[dead]
- TechniKris 9mo agoThis 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1afJ7OpacU * that is osu! (sic) rhythm game, not to be confused with OSU universities
- Karliss 9mo agoHas 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.
- aprilnya 9mo agoRegarding the last point, pompyboard is very much a tablet or pointing device meant only for enthusiast osu! players from what I understand. No artist in the world needs a 8KHz polling rate tablet let alone 1KHz. Tablets from other brands are much better suited for drawing. While the basic idea of a rectangle you put a pen on is the same for artists and osu! players, the more detailed requirements are basically opposites 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
- hindustanuday 9mo ago[dead]
- abdullahkhalids 9mo agoSome 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]. [1] https://github.com/ploopyco/trackpad https://github.com/ploopyco/trackpad https://ploopy.co/trackpad/ https://ploopy.co/trackpad/