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DIY tablet computer, maybe.
S. Heslop:
I've had alot of half baked ideas, unfinished projects, and false starts over the last couple years and this is one of them. No promises that this will go anywhere, and also keep in mind that I have no idea what i'm doing!
So here's a lifelong dream of mine - the ability to make my own portable computers. Mostly spurred by the endlessly disappointing world of pre-built portables. Some laptop designs were pretty good, especially the IBM thinkpads. But now every laptop manufacturer is chasing thinness to a riddiculous degree, leading to small non removeable batteries, cooling issues with more powerful hardware, and some of the worst keyboards and mice ever developed.
I was recently looking at those Microsoft Surface Pros, and as an art tool they almost seem ideal. There's similar offerings from other manufacturers with built in pen digitizers. But they all share the same issue - no buttons! That's the other part of modern portables that drives me nuts, the whole war on buttons. I figure it's some bean counter thing on saving money per unit, especially in building new tooling. But in digital painting you make alot of use of the undo shortcut. Some workarounds include running a program to put onscreen buttons on the edge of the screen, but then you're stuck fighting the palm rejection algorythm. Others are using external keypads. I think maybe some sort of clip on port expander style deal with some buttons could work. But then those tablets seem kind of expensive for something that'd take some fiddling to make useful
So naturally i've been thinking about making my own.
I found a forum dedicated to building pen tablet displays through various methods, and in the thread linked a fella made a couple of laptop displays work. I went and bought the same display, I believe, that he used.
I've yet to test if the display or its controller works. I'm a little hesitant to plug the suspicious Chinese circuit into any computers I own.
But I also bought a thin mini ITX motherboard that was going cheap on ebay a bit back. An ECS H81H3-TI2.
Which has an LVDS output, so i'm probably going to see if that Just Works first before worrying about using the Chinese board. I don't really understand LVDS and there's nothing in the manual about configuring it, but I believe some displays send configuration data over that hopefully the motherboard can handle.
I still need to assemble the rest of the hardware which will involve alot of Ebay Disappointment I bet. The board is limited to 8gb of ram and 4th gen CPUs, but that's also what I have in my desktop and the drawing program I use (Krita, excellent program and it's free) is mostly CPU rather than GPU dependant from what i've read.
So the real question is 'what shape?'
Whatever it is it's going to have to be quite chunky. I've collected a bunch of photos of old tablets and laptops from the earlier days of portables to hopefully inspire ideas.
They're surprisingly hard to find, I figured there'd be more enthusiasm for cataloguing them. They were all marketed under the idea of you being able to Compute while standing up, with built in handwriting recognition. I don't think any of them were hugely successful.
I was first considering some kind of laptop.
Acer recently made a laptop convertible with this style of hinge, the R7. It got poor reviews and Acer prostrated themselves in front of the tech journalism world and made sure their next version was more in line with what everyone else was doing. But I think what they came up with was pretty clever, since it still gives you access to the keyboard while using the pen display. It's kinda similar to the arrangement i've got with the graphics tablet stand I made a bit back to save on desk space.
But it'd still be way too complicated to build, and I couldn't find a source for those thin keyswitches that supposedly exist. So I think a more 'normal' style of tablet would be the way to go.
It's still early days and I've got some other angles to think about. The reason i'm revisiting this project is becuse i've found myself needing to accurately ink a whole stack of drawings, and with the way i'd been doing it previously (going over the line 20 times and hitting undo till I get it right) it was taking way too long. It turns out that the overhanging graphics tablet stand isn't such a great idea since it gives you no forearm support, and while it works fine for rough sketching from the wrist it's hard to do long consistent lines.
So i'm considering some kind of unit that can dock into an angled table. And I might forgo batteries since that's something i'd have to really bodge together and is really outside of my abilities. Plus I don't think i've ever seen anyone use a laptop or tablet away from a wall socket!
The first priority will be making sure all the hardware works together though.
S. Heslop:
Hah. Been on a google adventure trying to find what the connector is for the wacom board. Turns out it's a 14 way Hirose DF19. Finding out what it even was was only half the battle, as the other was finding a source to buy one. The usual sites all have a £12 delivery fee for 20p worth of connector, radiospares didn't have any, ebay had a few jokers trying their luck. So I started looking at replacement cables, plugging part numbers in. Eventually found an entire different display for sale with a digitizer board and the cables + inverter included for £10 and went for that.
That whole bongofish forum is fascinating though. For anyone that isn't aware, Wacom is a company that makes graphics tablet digitizers for digital drawing - and for a long time they pretty much held the monopoly on them with the high prices that entails. They also sold obscenely expensive Cintiqs, a pen digitizer display. So you can draw directly on the screen. They've also been liscensing their technology to various laptop and tablet manufacturers. Recently some Chinese companies have been massively undercutting them but the driver support is spotty. But I love the idea of DIY alternatives undercutting them even further. In theory a £20 microcontroller, £10 surplus laptop display, whatever it costs for a sheet of acrylic to cover it, and £15 for a controller board could be all it'd cost to have an Official Wacom with fancy drivers equivalent. You could even skip the microcontroller if you can find a digitizer with a USB output instead of serial.
JHovel:
Nice plan and you now have me subscribed to your thread :beer:
My interest isn't / wasn't in digital drawing but rather at sustained hand-held pen computing: working in a fast-paced clinic (in a prison health centre). I ended up with older Fujitsu 2300s which had native pen support with two 'mouse' buttons on them, a decent hand-hold on the side of the screen, USB, LAN and - using its PCMCIA ports - WLAN access.
Their relative thickness actually made them more comfortable in the hand than the much thinner tablet I use now at home (retired).
I have been interested in pen computing for decades in the health field, so I'm fascinated by what you develop for your profession.
If I may make a suggestion: don't be limited by what others are doing in terms of shape, consider 3D printing EXACTLY what you design - along with the option of changing things easily for Ver 2,3,4,5 until you have YOUR ideal.
Brass_Machine:
Oooh. This will be cool!
Watching!
S. Heslop:
That's interesting to hear a real world use for those older tablets. I was watching some old recordings of computer news TV shows to try find more tablets to look up and the sales guys always seemed to struggle to come up for good examples of their use. The one they kept going for was 'an estate agent could input a clinets information while standing and taking to them'.
Wish I did have a 3d printer though. I was thinking of leaving this whole project till after I build one since it'd make it alot easier, but I think I should be able to put something together with what I've got using wood and metal, even if it might look stupid. Even if it's entirely unrelated to tablets, the kinda look i'd like to go for is something like the Madsen LAR. Those forgottenweapons videos are pretty good if you've never seen them before, it's surprising how much history you can extrapolate from just looking at guns. But I think those rifles are the nicest looking mix of wood and metal i've ever seen. But i'd also settle for something clunky looking that just works!
Right now i'm trying to find a viable CPU. The motherboard i've got only supports the 4th gen intel Core CPUs which are still quite expensive for the higher end ones second-hand. I also would ideally want one with the lowest TDP rating possible since i'll only have a small heatsink. I might try get a cheaper low end one just to see if this stuff will work before I consider going all out.
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