Slashdot Mirror
Suggestions for Reliable Touch Screen Displays?
seigniory asks: "I'm looking to put about 20 touchscreen displays into operation as information kiosks in low-traffic areas (i.e. private waiting rooms, not malls). The application is written, but is mouse-driven, so a conversion to touch screen is necessary. At present, I'm imagining a 12-15" LDC with active-matrix, but will entertain other suggestions. Without much experience with the quality and durability of most touchscreen solutions, or the 'gotcha's' of converting an existing app to touchscreen, I'm at a loss as to where I should begin. I can't start the touchscreen w/o the actual screen, and I don't have a ton of money to play with yet, so I can't afford to waste money trying to find my ideal solution. Searches for 'LCD Touchscreen Display Reviews' has turned up not much more than ads. What experiences or advice can Slashdot offer?"
If you cover the touchscreen with a 6inch thick lead shield I hear it greatly increases reliability and durability.
Speaking from experience working with both food service companies and small mailbox etc. type stores, you will suffer if you get the cheapest available.
Biggest problem was inaccuracy or under sensitivity (the sense screen far enough off the display that viewing angle made it a pain to calibrate) and it just wearing out from use.
In the case of the small post office place, they decided that the amount of typing made the touchscreen a bad option since it was difficult to say the least for typing.
What kind of industry is this for? Is a mouse or trackball surface mounted out of the question? I know that the mouse/trackball is real short money.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
to look. Sure you don't get 3rd party reviews, but the prices are pretty good and you can get all sorts of kiosk and OEM parts. Touch screen technologies are discussed and can be added to any display. uhhh link.
Yawn.
lots of companies that work with kiosk cabinets google for "kiosk cabinet".
Not knowing what your software already looks like, this site asks some good questions for a touchscreen application.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
I had two kiosks at an outdoor location and the enclosure is *key*! I understand that you are doing it internally, but the enclosure is typically tied to a touchscreen of some sort, and that often will limit your options. Or, atleast provide guidance.
Our touchscreens required a special driver in windows and then simply behaved as a mouse. We had a real problem with text entry however.. we were using a special kiosk browser with pop-up screen, but people found it very difficult to use. A nice enclosure with an attached keyboard and trackball would have helped things dramatically.
I'll start off by saying that I typically don't recommend overly expensive (because I'm a tightwad), but in this case I'll make an exception.
Allen Bradley uses Elo Touch products for thier industrial control touch screen PC's. These things are wonderful IMHO - I didn't want to see the ones I had leave when the project was done, and they had to go be installed on site - I love mine as a nice 21" desktop montitor and touchscreen combo :-) These critters are a bit hefty price wise, but I haven't seen one fail yet in the field (and these are industrial areas - either gritty dirt or greasy type stuff). They are pretty nice displays, but a little more faded color wise than I'd like to normally use for a desktop application like Photoshop. Incredibly durable, lots of different styles, and they have excellent accuracy. I recommended 'em.
What I DON'T recommend is going with the lowest priced one you find. It will fail. Seriously. Don't be afraid to take your time, and find out what has the longest time between failures -vs- ruggedness (they don't always go together) -vs- the features you need. Anything less than what you need for the application is going to REALLY hurt you later.
As for programming for one - if it's on Windows, no problem. It's just a one-button mouse. They also have Linux, Mac, etc. drivers - it's just sending ya' mouse coordinates and a mouse click. For most applications, it's ready to roll before you even see the touch screen, it's that simple.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I recently wrote a traffic stop statistical program for a sheriff's office that used their laptop touchscreens as the primary mode of input. From that short 2-day project, I learned a few points that I'll pass on now.
First, make everything larger than you need it to be. I've found that the size of buttons I need on a touchscreen is only about 1/3rd as large as some of my less adept users. (Of course, they are also using these in laptops in often-moving vehicles.)
Secondly, try to severely limit the items on any given screen. I've found that users tend to be faster visual-scanners when they can just "tap" as they move their eyes, providing too many options on one screen can lead to more false-clicks.
As far as drivers go - just process the input as a one button mouse.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
There are many different types of touchscreen technology. The least expensive and the most common is a resistive touchscreen. These are also the least durable and give the most distortion. You can touch them with just about anything (including a golved hand) and they will work.
If you want something a little more durable, go with a capacitive touchscreen. These will cost a bit more, but they will be MUCH more durable and will look much better. You have to use a bare finger on them, but for indoor use this is an acceptable tradeoff.
There are other, less common, more expensive types that you are not likely to come across as well. Do your homework. I work in a casino - we have thousands of touchscreens. Gamblers are brutal, and all touchscreens are a PITA, but I think the capacitive type are your best bet.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
Porting mouse-based apps to touch screen can be a lot harder than people expect. I can't count the number of times I've had to remind touch UI design newbies that putting important information in a mouseover is a really bad idea. There are lots of more subtle gotchas as well. Most GUI widgets just aren't designed to be operated by a pointer as large as a finger. Dragging (for scrollbars, drag&drop, etc) doesn't work very well; the finger can stutter across the screen. Plus you have the user's hand obscuring parts of the display. Etc.
I was just about to make this comment.
My company uses 15" Elo touchs screens for all our industrial applications. The 15" models are great for office/light industrial use.
I work at a printing plant (currently the number one company in the world w00t). We use advantech panel computers w/touch screen displays at the back of the press and soon in the color booth. They get abused with ink, oil, and various solvents and after a year still have NO "dead spots" on the screen where it doesnt work. Using your finger the mouse cursor does jump around a bit but i always use the back end of a pen or another plastic tool to move the mouse/icons around.
http://www.advantech.com/ACG/
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
No matter what technology you choose for the displays, I would suggest having a box of cleaning wipes near the screen - preferably the kind that have Clorox or some other strong antiseptic in them.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'd also like to plug elo touchsystems. I used one of their systems quite a few years ago (a modified 21" mitsu monitor using their acoustic wave technology) for a project. I was in way over my head and they were very helpful. The product still works after some very serious abuse.
We use touch screens for one of our applications. They are placed in access points of Nuclear Power Plants. One thing we found when testing this project is that durability is a lot more important than originally spec'ed. We use a company called Touch Controls for our screens. They have a problem in that it takes forever to get a quote, but their technology is hands down the best.
Your point about the overuse of antimicrobials like triclosan is correct, but I am not talking about antimicrobials - I am talking about "Nuke'm till they glow, shoot them in the dark, and and let $DEITY sort them out" antiseptics, like sodium hypoclorite, hydrogen peroxide, Lysol, and the like.
Nothing short of an extremophile will survive those to engender resistance.
www.eFax.com are spammers
A couple of people have mentioned capacitive and resistive touch sceens. There is a better solution than both of these, a technology called Surface Acoustic Wave. It offers a longer life than capacitive, better accuracy than resistive, and IIRC. In fact, capacitive is in general better than resistive on all fronts, but SAW is not only longer lasting, it allows use without skin contact, i.e. by someone wearing gloves.
The 2 big names in touch are 3M (microtouch), and Elo. The both provide about the same services, and you'd have to have a relationship with them to decide which was better, I think.
There are new technologies on the horizon that will surpass SAW, but I've yet to get my hands on a demo unit.
Whats wrong with a mouse? Touch scrrens are often more trouble than they are worth and often confuse users who are expected to switch between keyboard and mouse. Your post doesn't describe the application so its hard to say what you're priorities are. Touch screens are often expensive, screens get dirty and touch screens loose calibration and stop working. A keyboard with some sort of pointing device or a menu with numbers/letters is often easier for users anyway. Or you could go the ATM route and have keys along the side of the screen with text arranged to relate the on-screen prompts. Details of your app would make it a lot easier to help you.
Depending on the operating system you use, the touch supplier will provide you with the driver to interface your touchscreen. The best solution for you is a capacitive toughtouch solution which has impact resistance for vandalism and can be sealed for moister and water. SAW will not handle that,
Coincidently, I was looking at that website recently, to get a small LCD screen (the one here). Unfortunately, they don't sell a controller board or anything. How am I supposed to link it to a computer without an appropriate connector? Can anyone help?
My gym has a fancy touchscreen thingy to track your workouts. I suspect that they used a capactive touchscreen* because if you get a tiny drop of sweat on the screen, it stops working. I guess they didn't really test their kiosks in actual gyms. Maybe that was intentional so that people would wipe up after themselves.
(* I don't know what the actual technology is, I just know these screens have this problem)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
There are 2 ways to get touch screens. 1) You buy a complete, pre-assembled unit. 2) You buy a touch screen kit and add it to your own monitor.
#1 is easier and safer, but more expensive. Also, these companies tend to use low-end, lowest bidder POS (and I don't mean Point-Of-Sale, either) monitors. They work, yes, but the screen adjustment controls typically can't get rid of all of the geometry problems.
#2 has all the attendant risks involved in cracking open your monitor and sticking new bits inside. Hopefully, they fit. And then, if you survive that, discovering your fingerprints inside the screen after you've put it all back together again.
We've also received factory made units with fingerprints inside, too. So there really isn't any advantage either way.
Ok, so I'm only talking about non-industrial grade CRTs here, but considering some of the junk we've ended up with, I bet their choices for LCDs suck, too.
im sure ill get modded down as an A.C., but if you see this, ive been using iiyama touchscreens for my HCI research; and though they dont get used as heavily as a screen would in a public kiosk, they probably see more use than they would in a private waiting room (probably 4-6 hrs a day of constant use, 5-6 days a week). theyre not dirt cheap, but they are reasonable, and the picture quality is great too. there is a bit of jumpiness when using your finger; but that happened on all the screens we tested, its a problem with filtering down a large oddly-shaped contact area (your finger) to a smaller point. a stylus (back of a pen, anything) takes care of it.
i highly recommend at least checking them out.
Most kiosk type things i've seen are a cabinet with a keyboard built in and a big fat trackball with 2 heavy duty old school style arcade buttons for clicks. Mice just aren't made for a kiosk setting.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Clorox is bad for your hands.
--
make install -not war
"Nothing short of an extremophile will survive those to engender resistance."
And that, Virginia, is where little extremeophile species come from.
--
make install -not war
we use the ELO touch screens in a manufacturing environment, have probably about 100 in service for about 2 years. They work really well, only bad ones I have seen in that time were ones I was first installing (returned to manufacturer)and it gets really hot where they are installed. I would also highly recommend these.
Your best solution is a capacitive touchscreen. 3M Touchsystems (formerly Microtouch) offers good support under both Windows and Linux.
How do I know? I spent the past several years at a major touchscreen video game company working on such things.
Having supported Touch Screens on Cruise ships for 5 years (both employee and General Public) we used Elo TOuchscreens and found them to very reliable and they hold their calibration very well. e also used POS terminals by PAR that had the computer and the touchscreen integrated and they were good machines. The touchscreens were good quality, but the access to the cables and such was definately not for public consumption. I'd reccomend the Elo touchscreens overall because they are robust, easy to use (USB) and have a nice software interface for auto-calibration. --Jason
--azurefog --If you're not learning you're not fighting the man.
Go with an industrial touch screen. We use Allen Bradley PanelViews in a wet, refrigerated, chlorinated washdown environment with minimal failure.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.