I have had a little bit of time to do some tests and there have been some interesting things happening but I need time to do more tests to double check things.

First of all this tablet has a pen reading height of 25 mm above the tablet case. The sensor doesn’t sit as deeply into the case as the Wacom but still that is an impressive reading.

Now the bad news is that the tablet gets a bad case of jitters when the operating LCD is placed on top of it. It starts randomly doing right and left click and other funky stuff. First I thought it must be the inverter so I tried various positions, having the controller/inverter boards on a different plane did seem to help but in this configuration I still get jittering and random clicking/moving. So I started unplugging things to see what was causing the problem:

- disconnecting back lights had no effect
- disconnecting inverter board from main controller had no effect
- putting the controller about a meter away from the LCD/Tablet had no effect
- Rotating the row column drivers perpendicular didn’t have very significant effect but could look into this some more
- unifying the grounds on the controller -> inverter -> column drivers -> row drivers didn’t have any effect
- some shielding material with plastic backing came with the monitor, I tried putting this between the tablet and the column drivers, no effect
- removing the whole backlight slab/unit and letting the LCD sit on the sensor(with paper in between for insulation) made it worse!

It seems the actual LCD is interfering with my tablet and not the backlight unit (or maybe that interferes as well but not as much). So I put the sensor back in its case and that actually helped a bit. All this time I was worried about things getting too thick but actually having the LCD too close to the sensor seems to cause some problems. Please note that these results are only for my tablet and my LCD, I think Wacoms use a different technology so I don’t think we can uniformly apply rules between different tablets or even LCDs.

After this I thought maybe increasing the distance between the LCD and sensor might help even more but it wasn’t to be… it helps a little but I still get the random clicking problem.

So now I am trying different monitor frequencies, resolutions, colour depths, so far without success. I have tried 60, 70, 72 and 75Hz, I will get the specs for this monitor so see what the range is and test them all.

A tip for other people doing tests, it’s handy to have a second monitor connected and have the stripped LCD sitting on the tablet, then you can move and disconnect things and still assess the result by drawing and seeing the result on the second monitor.

After a long wait the UC-Logic 1209 has arrived:

The first impressions of the tablet are that it is well made, not as nicely manufactured as the Wacom tablet but it is not super cheaply made either. The pen uses batteries inside it which I thought might make the pen feel strange but it actually makes the pen feel substantial and good to use. The tablet comes with Adobe Elements and trial versions of Photoshop and Painter plus the drivers and this is where the trouble starts.

The tablet is advertised as Mac compatible but the Mac drivers supplied with the tablet are too old and would not work on OS X 10.4.8. So I searched on the net and found some newer drivers but unfortunately these don’t work 100% either. In Photoshop the tablet works and there is pressure sensitivity but randomly the system stops responding and the CPU usage goes to 100% for 2 or 3 secs before the system catches up and the lines are drawn in Photoshop. This is very disappointing. :(

To make sure the tablet actually works I tried it on a PC running Win XP. Again the drivers supplied in the box were too old and did weird things to the system but installing the new drivers from the net fixed that problem and the tablet works fine in Windows.

After stripping the monitor as discussed in the last DIY Cintiq post, I ordered the FFC extension cable from DIY-Beamer and it arrived yesterday which was pretty quick considering DIY-Beamer is in Austria and I am in Australia. :)

I was a bit worried that I may have counted the tiny pins on the FFC incorrectly but it was ok, here are some photos of the FFC extension cable:

I tested the stripped monitor with its original cable to make sure it still worked after all my fiddling around, and it was fine. I plugged in the new FFC extension and turned the monitor on.

Nothing.

I had marked the cable to make sure that I put it in the right way so I unplugged everything and double checked and then went to put the cable into the ZIF socket on the circuit board again when the tiny door of the ZIF socket flipped out. Arghhh…. they are called Zero Insertion Force because you need Zero force to break them! The problem is that the FFC extension cable has a plastic backing so that it is easier to insert, unfortunately this makes the cable a bit too thick and puts pressure on the ZIF door, hence the door popping out, it is not completely broken but it is a bit damaged.

So I started very gently separating the FFC from it’s backing material using a very sharp scalpel. This went ok and now the cable fits very easily in the ZIF connector and with the door closed I get a good connection and monitor works with the new FFC extension put in.

Next problem involved a lot more time and patience. The cable connecting the controller board to the column driver circuit board was a very short bit of ribbon cable with two coils around it and some more shielding and lots of grounding. I need to extend the cable so that the LCD controller can sit behind the shielding for the wacom board hence minimizing interference.

So off I went to the local Dick Smith store for some cables, the rainbow ribbon cable seemed to be the closest thing to what I was looking for so I spent a couple of bucks on that and got started on soldering each one of the 40 odd tiny connectors. Here is a work in progress photo of the controller extension cable:

And the finished version:

There is no shielding around my extension cable and I have a feeling this is going to haunt me later on, but we’ll see how it goes, I can add it later if there is a need.

After testing the cable pins a couple of times with a logic meter, I connected everything up to see if it worked. Again nothing happened after the first attempt but turning off and fiddling with the FFC connector fixed the problem. Here are some shots of the test:

I’m now waiting for the tablet to arrive so I can do some testing for interference.

Oil on canvas

I have added a Travels tab in the menu above which will take you to a page with a number of my cycle tours around the world documented using Google Maps with photos from Gallery2, this will help organize things a bit better.

My partner has returned from Germany and she has brought with her a beautiful handcrafted CroMoly bicycle frame made by Patria, who have been building bicycle frames since 1898. This is the Ranger model which I bought last year on the German ebay, I have been waiting for it for a long time and it is finally here and I am starting to put together my new touring bike.

Here is an image of the frame:

Here is an image of my old touring bike:

This bike has a CroMoly Shogun SE frame, a Velotraum CroMoly fork with disk brake mounts, Rohloff SpeedHub, Magura Louise FR disk brakes(front) and HS 22 rim brakes(back), Brooks leather saddle and of course Schwalbe Marathon XR tyres. In the next couple of weeks I will be transplanting these components onto the new Patria frame to create a great touring bike.

The Ranger is a 700 bike while the Velotraum fork that I have is for a 26″ bike. After doing some test rides on the Patria with its own fork, I am looking to replace the factory fork with the Velotraum fork to make use of my disk brakes. The only thing is that I am not sure how different a 26″ fork is to 700 fork, if replacing the 700 fork with a 26″ fork changes the geometry of the bike too much then I will have to stay with rim brakes, but I am hoping that these forks will have similar lengths.

Oil on canvas board

This is one of my favorite animated shorts. The movement of the Monk is so comical and stylized, the minimal and beautiful design and lack of dialogue help this piece speak louder to soul. It is by Michael Dudoc de Wit.

While I had been busy developing the Glad Happy Feet flash game, the parts of the Samtiq have been slowly arriving. The 14V power supply for the monitor arrived yesterday and I tested the monitor, it’s working fine so I started the task of stripping the monitor. Here is the monitor before stripping starts:

This monitor is a bit tricky to open up, I had to look for hidden screws and then pry open the plastic cover by sliding a flat-head screw driver around the case to pry it open. Here is the monitor with the face removed:

This monitor has an external power supply and a base which has the connectors for 14V DC input, VGA and DVI. These inputs are carried through the base and the stand and fed to the main monitor case. Again it was a matter finding the screws to undo and prying open some plastic face coverings. All the above signals are fed to the monitor through one single connector which I had to carefully pry out. Once that was done the plastic back of the monitor was released.

There is some shielding which is easily removed via a couple of screws, once the shielding is off we are left with just the LCD, controller and inverter boards:

All the connectors on this monitor had a big dab of glue on them, once the glue was scrapped off the connectors could be removed and couple of screws undone to separate the LCD from the controller and inverter boards:

This is a close up of the controller and inverter boards:

After removing the above circuit boards, things started getting a bit dicey. The LCD has a metal backing which I guess acts as the shielding but the wacom tablet cannot sense the pen through this shield so it had to go. The problem is that this metal shielding also hold things in place so I need to find some way of holding things together if I want to have a usable unit.

It took a while to strip the LCD, there are lots of metal tape and I had be careful with the LCD row/column circuit boards. I removed the backlight lamps by undoing the tiny screws on ones side and then sliding them out. That frees up some other parts but the plastic casing hang onto other parts with little tabs which need to be carefully pried open. I don’t like this prying open of plastic parts, it’s much nicer when there are screws that can be undone and the thing comes apart. Anyway this stage of the strip was pretty scary too easy to damage things. I was concentrating hard so I didnt take too many photos but here is what the LCD sheet looks like with the backlight module removed:

As you can see in the image, there is a FFC (Flat Flexible Cable) connecting the Column driver circuit board to the Row driver circuit board. I counted the tiny connections a couple of times (and I mean TINY!) there are 20 of them and the pitch (which is the distance from one gap to the next) is 0.5mm. This is standard FFC but unfortunately the only place in Australia selling the components for making up an extension is RS and they have a minimum order of 5 or 10. So I am looking at getting this part from Lumenlab or DIY-Beamer.

So that’s where I am with the Samtiq, I will post more info as I get the parts.

Ok I’m back, after what seems to me like a long detour into the land of flash advertising-game development. This was a freelance gig for glad which is using the characters from the movie Happy Feet to advertise one of it’s products. If you are interested here is a link to the game:

http://www.glad.com.au/happyfeetgame/index.html

There will probably be some little changes coming through from the client but I am hoping that is about it, it has been stressful and I am just itching to get started on the Samtiq (my home-made Cintiq).