Touchscreen adventures I

Trading in a couple of old Pentium III computers I noticed in the second hand computershop an interesting project item, a touchscreen. Since the owner of the shop was reluctant to offer me any monetary compensation for me dumping 5 old computers on his doorstep, it seemed like a good idea to accept in trade the old industrial touchscreen. If only for the amount of space occupied.

For some time now I have been interested to take up a project which involves a webinterface to my todolist. Wouldn't it be great to be able to update my todolist from the couch without having to boot up my computer to add something to the list. Or even to do this without having to use a keyboard or mouse, just drag and drop from a predefined list of items..

While researching the information to determine exactely what I found myself with I drew a blank. Industrial items made to order for some sort of machine is not available through most databases since the only identifiers on the back are a customernumber and internal codes.

Well the only option left over, the makers answer: opening it up! Not a hard task, 8 philips head screws and the cover is off. 

On the left the convertor for the backlight. The board in the middle comes off with a couple screws and reveales...not much, a little CHIP to connect the DVI-connector to the screen and the serial connector. Does not look like a lot to me. Well 8 screws later and im holding the screen. A Mitsubishi AA12SB6C-ADFD LCD screen with a ELO Touchsystems 362740 attached.



I have tried to find a datasheet for either of the two but have been unsuccesfull up till now. Although I did find some more information about which points need to be addressed to be able to use the screen and the touchscreen.

For first it has to be attached to a computer. The touchscreen is no problem here as it uses a serial interface, just use a serial cable and hook it up to your serial port.

The screen is a laptopscreen according to my information, it can be used as a replacement part for a couple of different laptops:

It uses a DFP-20 connector which is hard to source. Some research has shown that suppliers selling to europeans do not stock the cable and whoever stocks it does not sell outside of the USA...you bastards!

Tonight I have found it on a Dutch site though so I fired off an email to find out if they are really in stock: http://www.aurora-kontakt.nl/snoer_computer.html.. Let's wait and see.

Then when it is attached, I will need a driver for linux for it, I have to find out how to configure X to accept the touchscreen as input, how to get the screen to work, some sort of driver for it, etc. Plenty to do still, projects with me tend to take some time...

Till next time,
//Z