Slashdot Mirror
Apple Files Patent For "Active Stylus" For Use With Capacitive Touchscreens
MojoKid writes "Apple may be looking to improve upon the stylus as we know it today. The Cupertino company filed a patent application with the USPTO for what it calls an 'Active Stylus,' which can be used on capacitive touch sensor panels like those found on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. 'Unlike conventional styluses which work passively by blocking electric field lines between the drive and sense electrodes of a capacitive touch sensor panel, the styluses disclosed in the various embodiments of this disclosure can either act as a drive electrode to create an electric field between the drive electrode and the sense lines of a mutual capacitive touch sensor panel, or as a sense electrode for sensing capacitively coupled signals from one or more stimulated drive rows and columns of the touch sensor panel or both.' According to Apple, active styluses allow for more accurate input without driving up cost."
When my grandparents were alive they had a box with one of those.
It was made for teaching people traffic signs. You put an overlay on it and used the active stylus to touch one of the alternatives and the box would indicate green or red light depending on your answer.
This reminds me of the old IBM light pens of yore... I really don't see much difference between this and those, or the wired pens that were used on old Gridpads in the early 1990s.
What is old is new again, I guess.
Samsung sues Apple for capacitive stylus. Wouldn't Sammy win just based on prior art?!
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
I am sure that if people look hard enough they will find that this already exists and apple are just up to their normal trick of trying to register something even though it already exists ..
Someone finish them off please mind you if there are enough £1million raids on their stores then retailers will start refusing to stock the junk .
(6951a) Application also defines a new stylus feature, in which the apparatus for holding stylus will either randomly release the stylus, or actively eject the stylus, depending on how important it would be in selection of one of the next features of software (see 976 d,e,g,zz et al) that may come up. Application claims trademark on the definition of this feature, Auto-Loss (tm), which is filed under separate registration for protection.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
styluses disclosed in the various embodiments of this disclosure
I would say that St. Jobs must be rotating furiously in his grave by now, but I think the fact that this "innovation" is yet another example of Apple patenting stuff that already exists is probably enough to ease his restless spirit...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I am bundling up and heading out! Which line do I stand in to buy one?
no comment
In a third embodiment, in-phase/quadrature (IQ) demodulation at the sensor can be performed to circumvent the synchronization issue in a touch sensitive system where the stylus can act as a drive electrode. FIG. 6 illustrates exemplary sense circuitry 610. The sense circuitry 610 can sense a capacitance from conductive elements of a touch sensor panel that are capacitively coupled to the stylus. The stylus sensing circuitry 610 can include amplifier 670 to receive the capacitance reading from the panel, clock 640 to generate a demodulation signal, phase shifter 645 to generate a phase-shifted demodulation signal, mixer 633 to demodulate the capacitance reading with an in-phase demodulation frequency component, and mixer 687 to demodulate the capacitance reading with a quadrature demodulation frequency component. The demodulated results (i.e., the in-phase component 643 and the quadrature component 697) can then be used to determine an amplitude proportional to the capacitance. Essentially, IQ demodulation can eliminate the need to phase-synchronize the drive signal from the stylus and the output signal from the touch sensor panel. However, frequency matching may still be required in this embodiment so that the stylus can be driving at the same frequency at which the touch sensor panel is listening.
Did they really just sneak a claim for IQ mod/demod in there? Something just about every single SDR uses and I'm sure plenty of other active receiver transmitter architectures use.
"According to Apple, active styluses allow for more accurate input without driving up cost."
Yes, cost, but not price. That's going to be driven up quite nicely, thank you.
TSA will ban them.
protecting the inventor yet again! Attaboy USPTO!
Whoda thunk you could put circuitry in a stylus? NOT ME!!
http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Light_pen
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/electronic+stylus
http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=4gpN4EILwz8
etc
etc
etc
Sent from my ENIAC
The Galaxy Note series use Wacom technology which, according to Wikipedia, was patented and is now expired. This is separate from the touchscreen, and provides stuff like pressure, tilt, and multi-device support (though I'm not sure if the latter is supported on Samsung devices). In short, it works really well, it's well-proven, and it's not patentable.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Look, we've had a good technology that produced fairly precise readings for years. It's called (...drumroll...) "resistive touchscreens". Unfortunately, Apple made capacitive touchscreens trendy & cool, and left those among us who need higher-resolution input handicapped and crippled.
Why, for the love of God, Xenu, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, can't someone like Otterbox just laminate a resistive touchscreen onto the Defender's screen guard, add some active electronics & an independent small battery, leech USB power when charging to charge itself too, and let us have a damn resistive touchscreen that pairs via Bluetooth (or as a USB OTG HID device) and coexists in parallel with the official touchscreen? No need to screw with the mass-market-dominated plans of Samsung and HTC... by moving the resistive touchscreen to the case & making it bluetooth, it becomes something end users can acquire and add THEMSELVES without having to screw around with official manufacturer support.
Or, if not Otterbox, one of the thousands of companies in China that would otherwise make Otterbox knock-offs... something like this would be trivial to engineer, design, and make functional with Cyanogen (even if it took years to ever make it into stock Android), and it would transform the manufacturer from "another nameless company making shoddy cases for ebay sellers in Shenzhen" to "the company that makes a case that makes Asian-language input easy and functional again".
They make resistive screens that aren't complete shit?
Did those things have an Apple logo on them?
Nope.
Therefore, they are NOT the same.
Were the light pens called "iPen" or "iGridPad"?
Nope.
Therefore, they are NOT the same.
Were those things stole....created with the divine direction of St. Steve Jobs?
Nope.
It's NOT the same!
It's new and different.
Personally.. I hate resistive touch screens and have for years. Need adjusting over time, the edges can be a bitch to hit, work like crap if they're dirty and work even worse than capacitive if your fingers are dry.
okay so you have 40cents worth of "stuff" in a stylus which means exactly WHAT?
1 you can fake pressure sensing by turning up the gain
2 you can do a 1 "finger" pinch/zoom by slewing the "clock"
3 you can get down to Retina Pixels
or what exactly??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I could see using "stylus" as the plural of stylus, but not "styluses". I'm really not a grammar Nazi. I don't know why this bugged me so much to make a comment.
One of the nice things about the Wacom tablets (typing this while looking into a 21" Wacom Cintiq) is that the stylus doesn't require any power. A quick glance at the patent application above has me seeing "power source" in the pen. I'm not that enthused.
I realise my Cintiq is damned expensive so the criticism above might not apply fully, but I don't feel I'm losing out on accuracy with my non-"Active Stylus" device.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Yes Steve Jobs, Apple has been blowing it since you left the world.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
HTC is priming it's legal team as we speak
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Hasn't WACOM done this for years with their pens?
Perhaps the only thing changed in the patent is capacitive instead of inductive?
Prior art here
The uDraw is capacitive, not resistive. I know, because I work for the company whose capacitive ASIC is in the uDraw.
Also, anyone who's signed their signature at a point of sale terminal (credit card swipe machines in grocery/hardware stores) that isn't resistive, has seen prior art.
sig: sauer
iLiner
The 1990's called and want their stylus's back, they also thought touchscreen was the rage now, you were lording over it during the 2000's.
Be seeing you...
Active styli are hardly new. There are many good active styli, mostly for serious artists. The best sense both pressure and angle. Some have buttons for airbrush-like use. Some come in groups, so you can have a different stylus for each color.
The i[Phone|Pad] is poorly suited for stylus use, because it's intended to sense fat fingers, and there's a minimum contact width of about 4mm. So the business ends of Apple-compatible styli are blunt instruments, more like erasers than pen points.
and they'll come up with the "iPalm iPilot". It will be all the rage. Every corporate slave will want one. Until Apple invents something even cooler - the "iBlackberry". Your iFuture will make the past look like the dark, dark ages, my friends.
They do, however, work nicely with pens.
This doesn't sound like an original idea at all! At best this is an incremental upgrade to a stylus, easily foreseen by earlier 'real' inventions. Eliminate all patents, the system just isn't working. The only people who think the system is working are patent lawyers because they've never been busier! Of course they love the current system, they're all getting rich on it!
The wife of a friend of mine has been using one of those on the iPad 1 for a few years now. She doesn't like touching the screen with her fingers.
Oh and see here: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/10/2925937/best-stylus-ipad-review
-- Cheers!
This is probably part of the wearable device Apple is working on. Most likely believed to be a watch. I had a Citizen Calculator watch a long time ago that used a stylus. As I understand it Apple and Intel are working on this watch or wrist device together.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
When you can just use a sausage.
"According to Apple, active styluses allow for more accurate input without driving up cost."
Except for Apple who would be driving up the cost through their licensing should it be patented.
The verb is input. The means like a gesture or voice command shouldn't be patentable.
They are often great with a stylus, it's just that they have poor sensitivity when used with fingers.
So keep both - capacative for low accuracy sensitive finger control, and a resistive screen for accurate stylus control. It's not rocket science.
oh yeah just like the stylus that have been shipping in Point Of Sale terminals for 15 years.
Is my finger a stylus under this patent? Just sayin'...
^^^ Exactly. Capacitive is ok for blunt selections, but are pure agony for precise selection. Personally, I used to solve both problems by slightly shaping my right index finger into a subtle, blunt point so it worked nicely as an adhoc stylus.
OK, I'll be honest... I'm a hardcore Graffiti user, and the official version for Android seems to be getting worse and worse by the year... partly due to apps that try to do Ajax lookups after each stroke, partly due to over-aggressive CPU governors that treat the appearance of a soft input area as an excuse to drop the speed down to 200mhz, and partly because it has no way to disable foreign accented letters & it's over-eager to recognize carriage returns. It pisses me off that a slow 16mhz Dragonball could achieve 99.9% accuracy, but my 1.5ghz quadcore s3 can't tell the fscking difference between 'm' and 'e' (written as backwards '3'), or between 'o' and 'g' (written as letterside-6). Actually, it almost feels like they recently re-weighted it towards Graffiti-2, because its worst recognition seems to be with the true single-stroke variants... which, of course, are the ones I use. Sigh.
I swear, I'm going to gut an old Palm III and transplant the Dragonball & Graffiti-pad to a hacked-up case and interface it to my Android phone via USB-OTG or bluetooth. Or make my own homebrew input method consisting of a M68k emulator running original assembly-language Graffiti ripped from a Palm III rom. I generally love my Galaxy S3, but its Graffiti error rate is TERRIBLE compared to older versions on my older phones. My creaky old HeroC overclocked to 711mhz has butter-smooth and accurate Graffiti... my S3 has me swearing in frustration trying to type the exact same text, and my old Photon & Epic4g aren't much better. I almost think multitouch capacitive controllers are partly to blame, because Graffiti's ability to work seems to be inversely related to touchscreen sophistication... :-(
I did capacitive coupling work with the intent of being able to reliably reproduce gestures.
Google ended up building a robot which could do this.
I wrote a small article about it prior to the Apple patent filing in a prosthetics forum.
The article contents used to implement capacitive coupling for a gentleman in Germany with two Bochs brand artificial arms who had never been able to use the capacitive touchpad on his Thinkpad because of lack of capacitive coupling with the artificial limbs.
I'd be willing to be a witness on prior art, including functioning hardware built on that prior art, for this patent predating the filing date. I can also point you to other people who worked with the robot, and also with capacitive coupling of mechanical systems, such as this stylus, for testing purposes.at Google, Synaptics, and Samsung.
'Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.'
-Steve Jobs, while presenting the iPhone
How is this different behind the tech used in the Galaxy Note, which is also an "Active Stylus", in that it is not just one of those imprecise capacitive-pen things, it is actually very precise with a fine tip?