Tue, 28 Oct 2008
Zytouch Driver.
At bCODE, we're using some projected capacitive touchscreens by a UK company called Zytronic for our Ubuntu Dapper based embedded devices.
When was first looking for touchscreens back in 2006, we chose the ones form Zytronic because they connected via USB and they had Linux drivers. Unfortunately, these drivers turned out to be binary only and were compiled for Redhat 9. Of course the big difference between Redhat 9 and Dapper was the Redhat used Xfree86 and Dapper was using Xorg. In spite of that, the binary drivers did sort of work, but were flaky and at times chewed up way too much CPU for no apparent reason.
In order to get something working quickly, I snooped the USB bus of a touchscreen connected to a windows machine to get a basic idea of the USB communication. It turned out that under normal conditions, all data traffic was from the touchscreen to the host using USB bulk transfers. The odd thing was that the amount of data transferred per unit time was much more than one would expect from something like a touchscreen.
In order to explore the data more fully, I then used libusb to whip together a Linux program that could find the device (Product:Vendor identifier of 14c8:0002) on the USB bus and then sit in a loop reading the USB data and printing it to the screen in hexadecimal.
Watching the hex data scroll by, it quickly became obvious that the data was the raw X/Y capacitive sensor readings for the screen. One complete read from the screen would consist of 32 bytes, one for each of 16 x-direction columns and one for each of 16 y-direction rows. Getting good mouse pointer performance out of this data was a little difficult due to a number of factors:
- The data from the sensors was very noisy.
- The 8 bit sensor reading for any row or column might have a quiescent value quite high in the [0..255] range and would wrap around to a low value when a finger was present in that cell.
- The sensors suffered from bleed into adjacent sensors so that if a finger was placed in column X, the readings for the columns on either side of X was also higher than their quiescent values.
Fortunately I had quite a bit of Digital Signal Processing knowledge and already had all the conceptual tools I needed to deal with this raw data. In the end I came up with a solution [Note 1] that consisted of:
- Bias the sensor value so that the quiescent value was low in the [0..255] range and there was no wrap over.
- Add a per column/row sensitivity normalization factor.
- Time domain filtering of each row/column value (this filtering was later removed to improve responsiveness).
- Find the row and column with the maximum sensor value.
- Calculate a centre of mass of 5 values around the maximum sensor value to obtain a finer grain resolution than the 16 rows and columns would normally allow.
- Apply scaling to get the calculated X/Y position to a screen x/y position.
Once we had the X/Y position data we needed to get it into the Xserver. The easiest and quickest way to do this was using the XTest extensions.
bCODE has now been using this touchscreen driver for two years, even updating it to use a later model from Zytronic (Product:Vendor identifier of 14c8:0003) which did its own filtering and spat out high quality X/Y values.
The reason I am blogging all this now is that bCODE has decided to release the code for this driver under the terms of the GNU GPL V3. The code is copyright bCODE Pty Ltd and I am listed as the author and maintainer and the code with live on my web site. Most of the nitty gritty details are in the Readme.txt file. The driver source code also includes a calibration utility written in Ocaml using the Ocaml Cairo bindings.
Note 1: It should be noted that I did most of the reverse engineering work during a period when I was insanely busy. After that week, I had a very rough proof of concept driver that still needed quite a bit of work. In the following three weeks, my manager Sean, in his spare time, hacked on the code, fixed bugs and even improved X/Y positioning algorithm.
Posted at: 22:03 | Category: CodeHacking | Permalink