Sam's Blog

After a lot of discussions with the glass shop about how 2mm glass is too thin and very easily broken, I ordered a circular piece of 3mm glass to be used for the working surface of the Samtiq. The glass has 3 holes drilled in it and bolts into the wood underneath it and then the little metal knobs screw ontop of that to hide the bolts.

I started by placing the glass on top of the Samtiq and marking where the screen was going to be. I then masked off the underside of the glass and started painting the glass black. Oh I made a Samtiq logo stencil and painted that orange before going over it with black. Need to wait for the logo to dry completely before starting with the black, which I didnt do and so I had to do a bit of a fix up later. Anyway it will look really messy painting the back of the glass but when you turn it around you get this even smooth colour (just like they used to paint animation cells). I had to do 4 or 5 coats of the black to make sure all the holes were filled. Here is a shot of me painting the glass:

Then I just marked where the bolts were going to be and drilled the wood and that was it. I am happy with the look of the unit now. Since I have the protective glass I can now use full pressure without worrying about damaging the LCD, although the glass is a bit too smooth and doesnt have the grip feel of paper but I hear that the felt nibs from wacom help with that. Here are more shots of the unit:

My animation course has started and there is little time to do anything so I had to be very quick with building the stand for the Samtiq, and I didn’t take that many photos, here are some shots:

I took it for a test ride and it is useable, it is not the brightest monitor and the fact that I am using a transparent folio to protect the LCD from straches doesnt help with the brightness. But tomorrow I am putting in the order for the glass top which will hopefully improve things.

Here is a quick animation that I did with it.

[kml_flashembed movie="/gallery2/d/4681-1/tail_pull.swf" height="250" width="420" /]

Here are some of the thumbnails and doodles I did while trying to figure out what would be the best way to build an eclosure for my home-made Cintiq.

I decided to use MDF to build the enclosure because it is easy to work with and will give pretty accurate rebates when a router is used.

So the top is half way there I think, still have to get some 2mm glass and also some type of ply wood which is 2mm thick for surrounding the glass. The glass also needs to be painted on the back so the circuit boards wont be visible, and of course the whole thing has to be cut into a disk so it can be rotated. Then there is the issue with the base, I want something which I can change the height of and at the same time stable enough so there wont be any chance of things accidentally falling down.

Now I am going to plug everything back in after doing all this fiddling to make sure I didn’t break anything in the process, fingers crossed.

After waiting for an eternity for the computer retailer to get its act together, my Wacom Intuos3 has finally arrived! This is a beautiful piece of equipment:

The Dell 1503fp that I stripped before (see previous posts) had been sitting in the corner collecting dust and now it was time to fire it up again to see if it would work with the new tablet. As I mentioned before the 1503fp was working with the Wacom Intuos2 6×8 with a little bit of jittering but since this tablet is smaller than the screen area for the project to be usable I really needed 9×12 tablet since I am using a 15″ display.

I placed the new Wacom still in the case under the stripped monitor and after checking that there was nothing touching or shorting any part of the monitor circuits, I plugged everything in, and IT WORKS!! Even better than the smaller Intuos2, there seems to be no jitter!

Next step was to strip the new Wacom and place the LCD directly onto the sensor and calculate how much room I have to play with when deciding on a protective glass or acrylic layer for the LCD.

There are some screws on the back of the Wacom and a single plastic tab which needs to be pressed before the back will work free a little then I had to carefully peel off the metallic ground tape that was stuck to the back cover and then I could move the back cover away, the USB lead still goes through it so it can not yet be completely removed.

With the back cover out of the way I started pulling at the actual sensor but it is stuck with a seriously strong double-sided tape. This tape it just too strong I think, I was bending the circuit board and it still wouldn’t budge, I would probably break the board or maybe damage the components if I kept bending it. So first I pulled back the circuit board a little bit until I could see the FFC cables which connect the sensor board to the touch strip which is a new feature of the Intuos3 tablet. I open the ZIF socket and pulled the tiny FFC cable out of the socket using a pair of tweezers. I couldn’t do the same for the other side because the ZIF socket is out of reach.

I grabbed the ever handy Utility Knife and extended the blade to maximum, then as I pushed the circuit board away from the plastic casing, I slid the blade of the knife in and carefully cut the foam-double-sided tape. And then the other side but this time being even more careful because the FFC was still connected to it’s socket on this side.

That was the most painful part of the whole process, finally everything came apart.

Testing the LCD with the stripped Wacom showed a little bit of interference on the LCD. So I put the LCD back into its plastic cage which increases the thickness but it is very convenient because it holds all the guts of the LCD together and also compensates for the tapering of the backlight slab. I tested the unit again this time with a thick stack of paper on top of it. I kept removing paper until the pen started to be read by the sensor again. The thickness of the paper was 10mm so if I use a 2mm piece of glass to protect the LCD from pressure and straches, I still have 8mm of space before the pen stops being read.

The intuos3 tablets have a number of customizable buttons and 1 touchstrip on each side. The first problem is that the row column drivers get in the way of these buttons a little bit, the solution for me was to turn the table sensor 180 degrees and then use the drivers to flip the orientation. This works very well and helps put the row column drivers away from most of the Wacom logic.

The next problem is with the buttons, after placing the LCD on top of the Wacom and building an enclosure around it, plastic buttons will not reach the circuit board and whats more these plastic buttons seems to be partly build into the Wacom case which would mean that I would have to damage the Wacom case to get them. It might be better if I could find different button to replace the Wacom ones.

Now that I have proof of concept, I have started to think about building the enclosure.

Firstly a little bit about the Dell 1503fp before we get into the stripped version.
Operating side-by-side with the Samsung 152T, this monitor is not very bright and the colours look muddy, the Samsung picture looked sharper, more contrasty and vivid. But if this means that I will have an operational unit then I will be happy with animating on that and using a second monitor for colours and things.

The stripping was very straight forward and much easier than the Samsung, most things came apart by undoing screws, only got to clicked-in things when I got to the metal cage protecting the LCD unit. I didn’t take any photos because this monitor has been stripped and documented by many other people.

The LCD panel in this monitor is a HannStar HSD150MX12, the date of manufacture of the monitor is 06/2002. The panel has one CCFL and the backlight slab is tappered just like Robcat’s, in fact I think that these are the exact same monitors just re badged. Which means that I have to be very careful with the row column drivers because two people have ended up with dead monitors because of the row/column drivers breaking away from the LCD unit. Comparing these connectors to the ones that I saw in the Samsung, the Dell ones look a bit cheaply made, so I will try to be as gentle as I can with them.

The controller to column driver cable is a normal ribbon type cable with enough room for me to be able to put the controller underneath a 9×12 tablet and the backlight cable is just long enough to reach around the other side.

There is a FFC connecting the column drivers to the row drivers. This is a 20pin 0.5 pitch FFC which is thankfully the same as what I used for the Samsung so I am happy that I didnt have to order another FFC kit.

The monitor has VGA and DVI inputs, although I don’t notice as much difference in the VGA to DVI picture quality as I did with the Samsung 152T. It has an external 12V power supply rated at 3Amps.

Trying Bhraaz’s Opening Gambit, which is placing the turned off LCD on the tablet to see if the tablet could read the pen through the unit, resulted in a fail. There is a piece of metal shielding at the back of the LCD unit which stops the pen from being read so you need to strip further and remove the cage and protective plastic casing to remove this shield.

Ok so it is completely stripped now and sitting on top of the UC-Logic PF1209, I turn on the monitor and straight away the computer starts receiving random click! :( I tried various things like removing the CCFL but the random clicking stays. Very disappointed by this result, so after fiddling around a bit more I decided that I would try putting my Wacom 6×8 (still in it’s case) under the LCD to see if that work.

After wrestling with Win XP to uninstall other tablet drivers and then reinstalling the new ones, I turned the unit on, no random clicking, no cursor flying to one side of the screen! I draw on the LCD and it shows up on the monitor just as I drew it, no crazy wiggles or bird droppings! I couldn’t believe it! It was working! :D

If I touch the pen on the screen and old it there, there is a tiny bit of a jitter but when I am drawing at speed I don’t notice it and the lines are almost the same as how I drew them (with a tiny bit of snaking), what’s more there is no shielding or earthing at all in this test, just put one thing on top of the other. I tried the test with drawing white on black and no noticeable difference.

I’m very happy about this, I just hope I will get the same result with a larger Wacom.

So here is my conclusion:

• Wacom technology is different to the other tablets, so if you get a non Wacom tablet with the same monitor as Drew’s chances are that it wont work. This has caused a lot of confusion because we have been trying to reproduce Drew’s results using non-Wacom tablets and different LCDs. So you can’t just grab any tablet and put it under any LCD to get a Cintiq.
• Drew has magically found a monitor which seems to run at the right frequency so that there is minimum interference with the Wacom tablets. I tried the Samsung 152T with the Wacom and that WAS intefering, so was Wei’s. There is something about the Dell 1503fp and other monitors which are the same but re badged (robcat’s IBM) that doesn’t stuff up the Wacoms.
• If you have a non Wacom tablet there are probably LCDs out there which wont interfere with the tablet but we haven’t found any yet. The easiest thing would be to open up a XPC-1700B and have a look, that has a UC-Logic module in it. Not so easy would be to keep buying LCDs and trying them one by one.

Now I have to wait for the 9×12 Wacom to do more tests.

Alright I tested as much as I could with the Samsung 152T and now I am going to try something else, so I put the Samsung back together. Here is the result of UNstripping:

It is harder to put the thing back together than stripping it! Specially because I had extended the controller cable and wrapped all this aluminum and electrical tape around it so it wouldn’t fit any more. I had to get rid of all the alu wrapping so that the cable was thin enough to close the case. Phew…. I am glad that is back together and there were a couple of times when I thought I had stuffed the monitor, I plugged it in to check and was getting nothing. I was convinced that I had finally killed the poor bugger but then I realized that the computer had gone asleep so that’s why there was no display! :)

Ok so now I start with “Samtiq II, the return of the jitters” or maybe “Samtiq II, the jitterminator” :)
I have decided to go with the monitor that Drew has used for his build the Dell 1503fp. Here it is:

Unfortunately as soon as I bought it these messages started appearing on Bongofish about jitter problems with the 1503fp! Lucky aren’t I? Anyway the strip will begin soon. I just hope that the FFC is a 20pin 0.5pitch so I can use my extension from the Samsung.

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 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.

This is the first challenger to the Wacom Cintiq although it is only 17″ and I am not sure about the resolution of the tablet (the LCD resolution is 1280×1024). Here is an info page from Hong Kong:

http://www.yutron.com.hk/products/p-active/products/xpc1700b.htm

Here is a product blurb:

Detailed Product Description
The xpc-1700b,17 inch with 1024 high pressure sensitivity level, with flexible stand display angle from 16 degrees to 75 degrees,1024 high pressure sensitivity level, allows you easily to work with 2d/3d graphic images/teaching/professional graphic design/industrial design/artistic design and so man more! Experience the true and exquisiteness like paper drawing.

Xp-pen series graphic tablet can be run under microsoft compliance software, such as pixia, photoshop, illustrator, painter, paint shop, corel draw, etc. Support window98se/me/2000/xp. Xp-pen graphic tablet is the excellent tools can fully satisfies customer requirements for sure.

This is all very new and it has just been advertised on export sites but it shouldn’t be long before individuals can get their hands on them. The price, if you buy at least 10 from the exporter, is US$585 which is reasonable but I still like the idea of building my own.

UPDATE:
The tablet resolution is 2000lpi according to these specs:

http://www.p-active.com/product/lcpt/xpc1700.htm