Pandora Touchscreen Pressure Sensitivity On The Pandora

[Esn]

Technically, the Pandora touchscreen is supposed to have about 16 levels of pressure sensitivity. However, no software currently makes use of this, and it seems that nobody is really sure of how to get it working.

I think that if implemented, this could be very useful to drawing programs on the Pandora, for example "Pencil".

I PM'd notaz about this two weeks ago. He wrote back:

pressure measuring is working on the kernel level, just run this command on pandora and touch the screen:

evtest /dev/input/event5

http://notaz.gp2x.de/tmp/evtest

However I have no clue how it's supposed to reach programs. I believe pressure value is lost somewhere in the X server. Perhaps some custom code in the program could read it directly from kernel interface.

I'm not a coder myself, so I don't really understand that too well. I just thought I'd start a thread, and see if maybe anyone else knows anything.

I also found this thread about getting the Pandora to recognize pressure sensitivity from tablets. Not sure if it might be useful or not.

 

[skeezix]

He's saying that you'd pick it up by reading the event device rather than through X11 itself; I've not tried it but I imagine it shoud lbe pretty trivial; libpnd presents some very easy to use APIs for reading the d-pad and analogs and suhc, and that code could be adapted to this purpose pretty easily with some trial and error.

jeff

 

[chris_c]

He's saying that you'd pick it up by reading the event device rather than through X11 itself; I've not tried it but I imagine it shoud lbe pretty trivial; libpnd presents some very easy to use APIs for reading the d-pad and analogs and suhc, and that code could be adapted to this purpose pretty easily with some trial and error.

jeff

I've read pressure from /dev/input/ and it seem to work ok, it just needs adding to xorg.conf afaik must add that to my TODO list....

 

[EvilDragon]

He's saying that you'd pick it up by reading the event device rather than through X11 itself; I've not tried it but I imagine it shoud lbe pretty trivial; libpnd presents some very easy to use APIs for reading the d-pad and analogs and suhc, and that code could be adapted to this purpose pretty easily with some trial and error.

jeff

I've read pressure from /dev/input/ and it seem to work ok, it just needs adding to xorg.conf afaik must add that to my TODO list....

Nice!
I've been working on updating the OS during the last days (you can see quite a few new GIT commits from me), if you find out how use it properly, it would be cool if you could tell me (or put the code on bugs.openpandora.org as feature).
It would also be great if we could use that for touchscreen sensitivity - I'd love to have my touchscreen a bit more sensitive, if we could adjust that value by simply setting a value, I'd implement that into the LCD-Settings-Script.

 

[Caine]

I've read pressure from /dev/input/ and it seem to work ok, it just needs adding to xorg.conf afaik must add that to my TODO list....

Cool, good to know. That will certainly prove useful.

 

[chris_c]

Nice!
I've been working on updating the OS during the last days (you can see quite a few new GIT commits from me), if you find out how use it properly, it would be cool if you could tell me (or put the code on bugs.openpandora.org as feature).
It would also be great if we could use that for touchscreen sensitivity - I'd love to have my touchscreen a bit more sensitive, if we could adjust that value by simply setting a value, I'd implement that into the LCD-Settings-Script.

unfortunatly looking at the code for xf86-input-tslib it doesn't seem to report pressure change events and unlike say wacom xf86-input drivers there are no xorg.conf settings.

 

[Esn]

Would it be a good idea to add this to http://bugs.openpandora.org/ ?

By the way, I recently successfully used Pencil - quite a nice program, easy to use for animations actually, if you use it right. Pressure sensitivity would make it even nicer.

Just a question: if this is gotten to work, would this have to be enabled/disabled on an app-by-app basis, or would there be a global setting in XFCE?

 

[Esn]

Looks like First over at the other forums got this to work in his MyPaint port:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/1817-mypaint-port/

I hope you guys can share info.