metabiosis

The software part of pond is almost ready and we’re now mounting all the bits and pieces together including the touch screens. Everything is working fine but we had a bit of troubles with the serial touchscreen, even though it is supposed to be working on Xorg, the calibration software provided by penmount is really outdated and produce bogus data.

Not to mention the impossibility to store the calibration settings on the firmware (only windows apparently…) so everything needs to be stored directly in the xorg.conf file. The free xorg input driver works I think, as it read from /dev/ttyS0 and translate the data in X11 events, but not the right events unfortunately. Because we could not find any documentation on the calibration settings, it is also virtually impossible to manually configure the driver.

Fortunately, tom came up with a cool hack, so now we read directly from /dev/ttyS0 by calling a pseudo driver that just filter out the unwanted hexadecimal crap and translate it correctly. The calibration is simply done within PF. In the end this solution is even more elegant than using the xorg driver and reading the X11 events from PF.

And yes it feels nice to play with the little thingies on the screen.