Sam's Blog

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.

Recently I purchased a UC-Logic graphics tablet and while giving feedback about the product to the company representative, I brought up the issue of tablet resolution. This is often measured in lpi or Lines Per Inch with some tablets going as high as 5000 lpi. My concern with the UC-Logic tablet was that it had a quoted lpi of 2000 while the Wacom range quote figures as high as 5080 lpi.

The response that I received from UC-Logic was that some companies use the lpi figure as a marketing trick, by using the maximum reachable lpi instead of the normal operating one. On the box of the UC-Logic tablet the resolution is quoted as 2000 lpi and I have now been informed that this is the resolution at normal operation but a maximum resolution of 4000 lpi can be reached. I am still not sure how this resolution is changed or under what conditions.

The representative explained to me that resolutions higher than 1000 lpi don’t mean anything in real life applications. For example at a resolution of 2000 lpi, each inch has 2000 lines and the width of each line should be 0.0127 mm (1 inch = 25.4 mm, 25.4/2000=0.0127). The pen tip diameter is about 0.5mm and has covered more than 39 lines already, that means if the lpi is over 1000 then it will be sufficient for all practical uses.

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.

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