PlayStation Touch Screen for Your Linux Box

hebertrich writes to tell us that IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about how to modify a PlayStation LCD for use as a touch screen panel for your Linux box. From the article: "Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux® a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that's yesterday's news. What's the next step in creating an easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers? Imagine adding a user-oriented LCD touchscreen. A touchscreen facade can make back-end Linux applications very usable in such devices as custom digital media centers (either in the home or in automobiles), DVRs and PVRs, and even control interfaces for household robots."

Comments

Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[Anonymous Coward]

If lack of a touchscreen was holding linux back, a procedure that requires cracking something else open, cabling and soldering will not be winning you new converts or my grandmother.

Re:Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[jacobcaz]

If lack of a touchscreen was holding linux back, a procedure that requires cracking something else open, cabling and soldering will not be winning you new converts or my grandmother.

Ding, ding, ding. I fail to see how adding a kludged together touch-screen would be the tipping-point in making Linux have a friendly interface. Is it cool? Yes. Is it the holy grail to making an interface user-friendly? No. That task is still up to application designers.

Re:Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[plantman-the-womb-st]

Things like this were best summed up by Rasterman (author of enlightenment) when he was asked if he felt linux would be "ready for the desktop". He said something to the effect of, "No, the desktop battle is over, linux didn't win. Don't waste your time trying to fight the desktop battle. Instead, put linux on people's cell phones, their toasters, on their PDAs. The future is in embedded systems. That's where linux can win." He's right. I think IBM understands this too. What things like this article do is, instead of helping a company sell something, they help a developer build something. That developer can then take a working prototype to potential investors without having to go to the trouble of finding parts distributor's and whatnot before testing their idea. They can just buy a PS1 at a junk store and strip it for parts. Once the investors give them an investment, thanks to the help of the working prototype, they can drop the big cash on custom components if need be and even buy in bulk.

So yes, this is a huge help. Developers don't just write office software after all.

Re:Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[chris_eineke]

Well, I suppose that if one invests hundreds of man-hours into a project without seeing it take off and accepted by a huge number of people, then one might tend to generalize that all similar projects are doomed to fail.

On the other hand, similar projects have been doing releases constantly and attracted a developer following of that the enlightenment community could only dream of.

Please don't understand me wrong. I am not bashing rasterman or the Enlightenment project. It just seems to me that the E. project has been making mistakes that they shouldn't have done; but I can't put my finger on what exactly they did wrong. :)

So what do you do at IBM?

[kyoko21]

I write articles such as the one mentioned above. I get payed to think and work on things that are eventually free.

Man, what a job.

Hmmm...

[setirw]

I wonder if touchscreens such as this could function on ADC (Apple Display Connection), which integrates both DVI-I and USB into one plug... That way, a separate serial/USB cable for transmitting HID data wouldn't be necessary.

Re:Hmmm...

[moosesocks]

Apple's depreciated ADC because it created more inconveniences than it solved, ie. no powerbook compatibility, hence the necessity for an DVI -> ADC adaptor which you would also need if you had 2 displays. If you wanted to connect 2 non-apple displays, you needed a ADC -> DVI adaptor. If you wanted to connect a VGA display, you needed another (and somewhat rare/expensive) adaptor.

Oh, and it created all hell if you wanted to use one of apple's (very nice) LCD panels on a PC (not to mention that the early cinema displays & DVI adaptors didn't conform to the proper DVI spec)

And thus, I think all current-model macs ship with DVI ports instead. Creating a new ADC device would be completely pointless

Think of the possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Nethack Touch Screen Edition, you could... finger finger, finger bash, finger fsck... you get the point.

sigh

[Hognoxious]

Touchscreens. The universal UI panacea. Well, apart from speech recognition.

Not much of a connection...

[Funakoshi]

to Linux really.

While the article has a point that touch-activated LCDs would indeed increase the usability of custom aps, Im not sure how it implies "...easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers..." that would be a benefit solely to Linux. The operating system is really irrelevant, it's the LCDs that are the key technology.

Nifty project if you have the time on your hands I suppose.

or just buy a 7" touchscreen

[Anonymous Coward]

its not like they are expensive (150$), plus you get to choose between resistive or capacitance touch and get the benefits of modern TFT manufacturing and a warranty, seems like a no brainer really, or of course you can trash a PS1

Re:or just buy a 7" touchscreen

[elviscious]

PSone on Ebay
Hmmm, $1.00, or $150.... I've made my choice

What about industry???

[$RANDOMLUSER]

There are a lot of factory shop floors that could benefit from cheap touch screen input to Linux boxes.

Grandma

[MasterPi]

This'd probably be good for older people who lack the mouse skills to get interested in computers. I've watched older folks be frustrated with not being able to click something and just give up without experiencing the functionality of a computer. Young kids as well, although they learn new skills easier so this isn't as much of a barrier. (yes, lack of motor skills plays a role but there isn't too much a kid that age can do on a computer except play the newest edition of Blue's Clues). I'm not sure how much it would catch on in the mainstream, because mice tend to be more accurate, but I can see this as good for those who can't use mice yet. Of course as soon as Linux does it Microsoft will too and claim they had it first, but whatever so long as it enables more people to enhance their lives using computers. Now, how much of an enhancement using Windows is is debatable....

Re:Grandma

[G60]

FWIW, little kids generally don't have any problems using a mouse. In fact they seem to pick it up almost immediately - possibly given that they have no preconceived expectations, as opposed to old folks who are somewhat prone to expect it to be difficult and new-fangled, which kind of sets them up for failure.

For the old folks, I think the idea of a touchscreen-driven web browsing device has legs, and Linux would be the perfect base for something like that (as long as nobody ever saw it, a la TiVo). If you made it relatively pleasant to look at and could stand it up on an end table, you could sell it as an 'ever-changing picture frame' as well - the digital camera-toting generation down could send pictures to it, and it would display them as a screensaver.

One fairly important thing missing is how to handle hover/mouseover type links, given that there is no touchscreen equivalent for that - of course there are few other elements that would need to be set up right for touchscreen.

Now if only there was a relatively mature, well-supported, extensible open-source browser out there somewhere.

Oh. Right. So there is.

kind of interesting.

[LWATCDR]

You could use the cheap PSOne screen+touch screen as a control panel for a mythTV box.
Add a second card to run the PSOne lcd and your main card for the video out.

Interesting, but not practical

[snookumz]

Touchscreens are only useful when they are on handheld devices. For your average home computer, they make no real sense. For one thing, a desktop pc will always have it's screen perpendicular to the hands natural orientation. That creates unnecessary strain. Another thing is that touching doesn't work well with the office metaphor to which most os, including linux, adhere. The ideal touch interface would have a flat screen embedded face up or maybe at a 35 angle in a table. It could have a square section representing your out/in box, a list of icons on the side representing such things as calendar or notes, etc. Think how easy it would be to have ebooks or architectural schematics on an entire desktop. Of course this would probably require some sort of cheap e-paper, but I think the possibilities are endless.

The PsOne LCD dose NOT have a touch screen?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I have a PSOne LCD screen and as far as I amaware it does not have any touch screen functioanlity, only display and sound. I have hacked mine up already and since many Nvidia cards do not have the right type of VGA sync signal I use the S-VIDEO TV out of my Nvidia card instead. If you run with TV out then select the native resolution of the pannel (320x240) as your TV res mode it is pixel perfect. Please could someone correct me if I am wrong about the touch screen functionailty of the Psone LCD screen?

Re:The PsOne LCD dose NOT have a touch screen?

[snookumz]

Your not wrong. They're putting a touch screen overlay over the PSone lcd.

Interfaces are still inadequate

[The OPTiCIAN]

"Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that's yesterday's news"

It might be yesterday's news, but that isn't to say that it's less current today. Try making sense of the clipboard in apps on the linux platform:

First test:
- copy text containing 'Windows characters' (eg: stupid quotation marks - 'long' dash)
- try to paste into gnome-terminal
-> does nothing, which would be even worse for people who don't understand the issues around Windows characters (why can't it just filter the characters?)

Second test:
- copy text in gnome-terminal or gedit
- close the window
- try pasting somewhere
-> doesn't work (the clipboard data has disappeared)

They're just off-the-cuff examples of usability problems in a linux platform, and they are neither user- nor idiot-friendly. I'm on my gentoo workstation at work at the moment but am pretty sure Badger suffers identical problems.

Re:Touchscreens holding Linux back?

[__aaclcg7560]

The problem is that user gets a headless linux server and doesn't know how SSH into the box from another machine to use the PINE email client. Presto! A touchscreen LCD solves the problem. It's what known as an IBM solution. :P

Mission Accomplished!

[Pedrito]

Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux® a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that's yesterday's news.

This sounds a lot like (and is about as accurate as) Bush on the U.S.S. Lincoln claiming "Mission Accomplished."

The #1 thing holding back *nix from home PCs...

[maillemaker]

From TFA:

"Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux® a commercially viable product for end users..."

I would switch to Linux on my home PC /today/ except for one thing. The primary purpose of my home PC is entertainment. Until I can run my games on it, and I'm talking maintstream-buy-at-Walmart games, it's just never going to happen for me.

I want to be on the Linux bandwagon in a big way. I'd switch instantly. But that is the showstopper for me.

Steve

Interesting to see the responses here

[FoamingToad]

given the amount of /.ers who were stating quite vehemently their intent to never buy any Sony products ever a couple of weeks back [Slashdot, passim].

A bit expensive but ...

[Ricochet]

I've been working with the Nokia 770 (http://www.nokiausa.com/770) and it's a nice small wireless (802.11b) ARM PC running Linux. It has a 800x400 touch screen that I'm comfortable with. It has a streaming music app, email, a browser (Opera) and a couple of other apps on it as well as storage for adding more. I plan on using it for my HA interface (running http://www.misterhouse.com/) so the browser is important. So far it works rather well and beats bringing a book into the bathroom for reading. :-) This will be used to replace my my 3COM Audrey, which is hardwired. If they can get the price down I think this device has a chance.

Smirnoff

[slashdotmsiriv]

In Soviet Russia screens touch you...

Simultaneous xservers on linux?

[evilad]

I recently tried and failed to add a touchscreen to my media server. The stumbling block was finding a way to have a simultaneous xservers (Ubuntu Breezy x.org 6.8) running on different video cards. No matter what I do, only one will be active at a time (one per virtual console), and I'm forced to switch between them with the Alt-Fkeys.

A little searching found the ancient Backstreet Ruby project, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do it with a modern kernel and xserver.

Anyone managed to accomplish this recently?

Re:Option: Siemens simpad

[AEton]

Dude, when you're using Anti-Slash's Database Tool to rip comments, please remember to strip the second layer of [link references]. Otherwise everybody notices that you're plagiarizing and you ruin the game.

Hint: hit the "HTML" link on the right side to get text you can copy & paste easily. Just paste it in, post in mode "HTML Formatted", and you're good to go and you've avoided this problem.

Also note that you can "lock out" comments if you're logged in to Anti-Slash, so people can't just search the DB for Qtopia to see where you copied your comment from. (In this case, it wouldn't have helped, since I Googled first.)

Thanks for trying!

Why not spare yourself the agony

[Anonymous Coward]

...and throw your money on these linux guys http://damnsmalllinux.org/store/TFT_LCD? After you're done, THEN you decide whether the car or the house gets the lil box...

You know it's sad

[Andy Dodd]

When the original poster doesn't even bother to RTFA.

If you actually read the article, it becomes painfully clear that there is no "PSOne touchscreen" - The PSOne display is simply a cheap small display that he is placing behind a touchscreen that didn't come built in to a display. He does not make a SINGLE mention as to exactly what model of touchscreen he used, nor where to get it, and there is nothing preventing you from getting a touchscreen large enough to put on a normal LCD monitor (or a CRT for that matter), other than possibly cost. (He does mention the brand indirectly, apparently the touchscreens are made by eGalax, although looking at eGalax's website gives me the impression that they only make controller ICs for touch screens, not complete touchscreen units. They also do not have any U.S. based distributors listed.)

power requirements, ADC adaptors and such

[green pizza]

ADC also carried the power for the display. Having analog+dvi+usb+power on one connector really cut down on cable clutter. Even Apple's 17" CRT was powered by the ADC connector!

But it was hell for the graphics card! Apple had to add a card edge power and usb connector just past the end of the AGP connector on its graphics cards, meaning not only did they have to have their own firmware and video connector for the ATI and NVIDIA cards they used, but also their own special printed circuit board to route the power and USB to the ADC connector as well. BTW, the ADC->VGA adaptors were pretty common, ADC macs used to ship with such an adapter and they sold new for $10 - $30, it's just a little thing that routes the analog RGBHV pins from the ADC connector to a VGA connector, much like the "Mac"->VGA adapters back when Apple used DB15 for video.

Apple ditched ADC about two years ago when they switched to DVI for their aluminum skinned LCD monitors... more specifically, dual link (DDL) DVI to suppor the resolution of their 30" monitor (ADC only supported single link DVI).

This wasn't the first time Steve Jobs tried this, back in 1988 his NeXT computers used a single cable to carry power, video, audio, and keyboard/mouse data to the snazzy black monitor. This became a headache when NeXT went color, requiring a combination speaker box and splitter cable.

Re:Cool

[ozmanjusri]

I, for one, welcome our new PlayStation LCD touch screen-controlled robot overlords?

I don't. The single biggest problem with this project is that it requires a Sony product, and I aint gonna buy Sony products no more. I'll be doing my best to discourage others from buying them too.