(I actually did this at the tail end of 2009, then I revised the python script it in 2010. I've been thinking of attacking the problem with un-smooth lines when the cursor is dragged...)
A friend gave me one of these Fujitsu B3020D Lifebooks. It's quite beat up. No, really, the screen is cracked in the lower left corner and a failing hard drive or bad RAM requires that I reboot the thing periodically. It's currently running Windows 7 and Skype with a Zoom adapter so I can plug cordless telephone bases into it. But before that, it was running Ubuntu. It ran Ubuntu for a good week to a week and a half. The touchscreen didn't work on it, and the screen was cracked even then, but it wasn't a bad little system. The battery life was good, the wireless worked without having to fight with it, and I thought it would be fun to reverse engineer the touchscreen and write some kind of mouse driver.
It didn't take me long to see that the touchscreen is actually exposed to the system as a serial device. That's damn cool. If you just start cating out the serial ports at the console and then touching the screen, you'll eventually see it spew a bunch of numbers. That's how I figured out which serial port it was using. After that you can pretty much tell what the values mean just by trial and error. There's a byte that indicates the type of event (push/release/drag) and then a series of bytes indicating the x and y coordinates. I suggest piping the output of cat through xxd in order to see the byte values in hex. For example: cat /dev/ttyS2 | xxd -
I don't recall from memory what the different byte values were, but you can kind of tell from the python script I wrote for it. This script reads the touch screen and will tell X11 to move the mouse around the screen and click the left mouse button in pretty much the way you would expect it. However, if you run the gimp or some other paint program, you'll notice that touching and dragging results in a rather imperfect line. Instead of nice diagonal lines, you get these crazy little semi-circles. If I ever get a second system set up to run my Skype phone (or can borrow another one of these laptops,) I'll revisit the script and see if I can fix it, but otherwise it works okay.
Here's the script via pastebin: touchmy.py
A friend gave me one of these Fujitsu B3020D Lifebooks. It's quite beat up. No, really, the screen is cracked in the lower left corner and a failing hard drive or bad RAM requires that I reboot the thing periodically. It's currently running Windows 7 and Skype with a Zoom adapter so I can plug cordless telephone bases into it. But before that, it was running Ubuntu. It ran Ubuntu for a good week to a week and a half. The touchscreen didn't work on it, and the screen was cracked even then, but it wasn't a bad little system. The battery life was good, the wireless worked without having to fight with it, and I thought it would be fun to reverse engineer the touchscreen and write some kind of mouse driver.
It didn't take me long to see that the touchscreen is actually exposed to the system as a serial device. That's damn cool. If you just start cating out the serial ports at the console and then touching the screen, you'll eventually see it spew a bunch of numbers. That's how I figured out which serial port it was using. After that you can pretty much tell what the values mean just by trial and error. There's a byte that indicates the type of event (push/release/drag) and then a series of bytes indicating the x and y coordinates. I suggest piping the output of cat through xxd in order to see the byte values in hex. For example: cat /dev/ttyS2 | xxd -
I don't recall from memory what the different byte values were, but you can kind of tell from the python script I wrote for it. This script reads the touch screen and will tell X11 to move the mouse around the screen and click the left mouse button in pretty much the way you would expect it. However, if you run the gimp or some other paint program, you'll notice that touching and dragging results in a rather imperfect line. Instead of nice diagonal lines, you get these crazy little semi-circles. If I ever get a second system set up to run my Skype phone (or can borrow another one of these laptops,) I'll revisit the script and see if I can fix it, but otherwise it works okay.
Here's the script via pastebin: touchmy.py
2 comments:
Hi, I have a Lifebook 3020, running Ubuntu that does not have a functional touch screen and I would like to set it up to work. Can you tell me step by step (I'm new to Ubuntu/programming), how to install software, drivers, etc. to make this work?
Thanks
If you install the dependencies, you can just run the script. I don't recall if it needed more than xlib and serial for python. And I've no way of testing it ATM. But you could try:
sudo apt-get install python-xlib python-serial
python touchmy.py
If it runs without error then go ahead and poke your screen. If you get errors, post them and I'll try to help out.
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