PlayStation Touch Screen for Your Linux Box

hebertrich writes to tell us that IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about how to modify a PlayStation LCD for use as a touch screen panel for your Linux box. From the article: "Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux® a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that's yesterday's news. What's the next step in creating an easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers? Imagine adding a user-oriented LCD touchscreen. A touchscreen facade can make back-end Linux applications very usable in such devices as custom digital media centers (either in the home or in automobiles), DVRs and PVRs, and even control interfaces for household robots."

Re:Hmmm...

[moosesocks]

Apple's depreciated ADC because it created more inconveniences than it solved, ie. no powerbook compatibility, hence the necessity for an DVI -> ADC adaptor which you would also need if you had 2 displays. If you wanted to connect 2 non-apple displays, you needed a ADC -> DVI adaptor. If you wanted to connect a VGA display, you needed another (and somewhat rare/expensive) adaptor.

Oh, and it created all hell if you wanted to use one of apple's (very nice) LCD panels on a PC (not to mention that the early cinema displays & DVI adaptors didn't conform to the proper DVI spec)

And thus, I think all current-model macs ship with DVI ports instead. Creating a new ADC device would be completely pointless

Interesting, but not practical

[snookumz]

Touchscreens are only useful when they are on handheld devices. For your average home computer, they make no real sense. For one thing, a desktop pc will always have it's screen perpendicular to the hands natural orientation. That creates unnecessary strain. Another thing is that touching doesn't work well with the office metaphor to which most os, including linux, adhere. The ideal touch interface would have a flat screen embedded face up or maybe at a 35 angle in a table. It could have a square section representing your out/in box, a list of icons on the side representing such things as calendar or notes, etc. Think how easy it would be to have ebooks or architectural schematics on an entire desktop. Of course this would probably require some sort of cheap e-paper, but I think the possibilities are endless.

Re:The PsOne LCD dose NOT have a touch screen?

[snookumz]

Your not wrong. They're putting a touch screen overlay over the PSone lcd.

Re:Think of the possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Only for users of one specific Linux distribution -- Polax.

Re:Option: Siemens simpad

[AEton]

Dude, when you're using Anti-Slash's Database Tool [anti-slash.org] to rip comments, please remember to strip the second layer of [link references]. Otherwise everybody notices that you're plagiarizing [slashdot.org] and you ruin the game.

Hint: hit the "HTML" link on the right side to get text you can copy & paste easily. Just paste it in, post in mode "HTML Formatted", and you're good to go and you've avoided this problem.

Also note that you can "lock out" comments if you're logged in to Anti-Slash, so people can't just search the DB for Qtopia to see where you copied your comment from. (In this case, it wouldn't have helped, since I Googled first.)

Thanks for trying!

power requirements, ADC adaptors and such

[green pizza]

ADC also carried the power for the display. Having analog+dvi+usb+power on one connector really cut down on cable clutter. Even Apple's 17" CRT was powered by the ADC connector!

But it was hell for the graphics card! Apple had to add a card edge power and usb connector just past the end of the AGP connector on its graphics cards, meaning not only did they have to have their own firmware and video connector for the ATI and NVIDIA cards they used, but also their own special printed circuit board to route the power and USB to the ADC connector as well. BTW, the ADC->VGA adaptors were pretty common, ADC macs used to ship with such an adapter and they sold new for $10 - $30, it's just a little thing that routes the analog RGBHV pins from the ADC connector to a VGA connector, much like the "Mac"->VGA adapters back when Apple used DB15 for video.

Apple ditched ADC about two years ago when they switched to DVI for their aluminum skinned LCD monitors... more specifically, dual link (DDL) DVI to suppor the resolution of their 30" monitor (ADC only supported single link DVI).

This wasn't the first time Steve Jobs tried this, back in 1988 his NeXT computers used a single cable to carry power, video, audio, and keyboard/mouse data to the snazzy black monitor. This became a headache when NeXT went color, requiring a combination speaker box and splitter cable.