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."

Not much of a connection...

[Funakoshi]

to Linux really.

While the article has a point that touch-activated LCDs would indeed increase the usability of custom aps, Im not sure how it implies "...easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers..." that would be a benefit solely to Linux. The operating system is really irrelevant, it's the LCDs that are the key technology.

Nifty project if you have the time on your hands I suppose.

Re:Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[jacobcaz]

If lack of a touchscreen was holding linux back, a procedure that requires cracking something else open, cabling and soldering will not be winning you new converts or my grandmother.

Ding, ding, ding. I fail to see how adding a kludged together touch-screen would be the tipping-point in making Linux have a friendly interface. Is it cool? Yes. Is it the holy grail to making an interface user-friendly? No. That task is still up to application designers.

or just buy a 7" touchscreen

[Anonymous Coward]

its not like they are expensive (150$), plus you get to choose between resistive or capacitance touch and get the benefits of modern TFT manufacturing and a warranty, seems like a no brainer really, or of course you can trash a PS1

Touchscreens holding Linux back?

[gbobeck]

Whoa... wait a minute... I thought it was a lack of a good email client that was holding Linux back.

What about industry???

[$RANDOMLUSER]

There are a lot of factory shop floors that could benefit from cheap touch screen input to Linux boxes.

Grandma

[MasterPi]

This'd probably be good for older people who lack the mouse skills to get interested in computers. I've watched older folks be frustrated with not being able to click something and just give up without experiencing the functionality of a computer. Young kids as well, although they learn new skills easier so this isn't as much of a barrier. (yes, lack of motor skills plays a role but there isn't too much a kid that age can do on a computer except play the newest edition of Blue's Clues). I'm not sure how much it would catch on in the mainstream, because mice tend to be more accurate, but I can see this as good for those who can't use mice yet. Of course as soon as Linux does it Microsoft will too and claim they had it first, but whatever so long as it enables more people to enhance their lives using computers. Now, how much of an enhancement using Windows is is debatable....

kind of interesting.

[LWATCDR]

You could use the cheap PSOne screen+touch screen as a control panel for a mythTV box.
Add a second card to run the PSOne lcd and your main card for the video out.

The PsOne LCD dose NOT have a touch screen?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I have a PSOne LCD screen and as far as I amaware it does not have any touch screen functioanlity, only display and sound. I have hacked mine up already and since many Nvidia cards do not have the right type of VGA sync signal I use the S-VIDEO TV out of my Nvidia card instead. If you run with TV out then select the native resolution of the pannel (320x240) as your TV res mode it is pixel perfect. Please could someone correct me if I am wrong about the touch screen functionailty of the Psone LCD screen?

Interfaces are still inadequate

[The OPTiCIAN]

"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"

It might be yesterday's news, but that isn't to say that it's less current today. Try making sense of the clipboard in apps on the linux platform:

First test:
- copy text containing 'Windows characters' (eg: stupid quotation marks - 'long' dash)
- try to paste into gnome-terminal
-> does nothing, which would be even worse for people who don't understand the issues around Windows characters (why can't it just filter the characters?)

Second test:
- copy text in gnome-terminal or gedit
- close the window
- try pasting somewhere
-> doesn't work (the clipboard data has disappeared)

They're just off-the-cuff examples of usability problems in a linux platform, and they are neither user- nor idiot-friendly. I'm on my gentoo workstation at work at the moment but am pretty sure Badger suffers identical problems.

Katana's Law of Linux Articles

[katana]

The more the article emphasizes Linux "ease of use" or "desktop readiness", the higher the likelihood that a user will be hand-editing X config files.

The #1 thing holding back *nix from home PCs...

[maillemaker]

From TFA:

"Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux® a commercially viable product for end users..."

I would switch to Linux on my home PC /today/ except for one thing. The primary purpose of my home PC is entertainment. Until I can run my games on it, and I'm talking maintstream-buy-at-Walmart games, it's just never going to happen for me.

I want to be on the Linux bandwagon in a big way. I'd switch instantly. But that is the showstopper for me.

Steve

Re:Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[plantman-the-womb-st]

Things like this were best summed up by Rasterman (author of enlightenment) when he was asked if he felt linux would be "ready for the desktop". He said something to the effect of, "No, the desktop battle is over, linux didn't win. Don't waste your time trying to fight the desktop battle. Instead, put linux on people's cell phones, their toasters, on their PDAs. The future is in embedded systems. That's where linux can win." He's right. I think IBM understands this too. What things like this article do is, instead of helping a company sell something, they help a developer build something. That developer can then take a working prototype to potential investors without having to go to the trouble of finding parts distributor's and whatnot before testing their idea. They can just buy a PS1 at a junk store and strip it for parts. Once the investors give them an investment, thanks to the help of the working prototype, they can drop the big cash on custom components if need be and even buy in bulk.

So yes, this is a huge help. Developers don't just write office software after all.

Re:Grandma

[G60]

FWIW, little kids generally don't have any problems using a mouse. In fact they seem to pick it up almost immediately - possibly given that they have no preconceived expectations, as opposed to old folks who are somewhat prone to expect it to be difficult and new-fangled, which kind of sets them up for failure.

For the old folks, I think the idea of a touchscreen-driven web browsing device has legs, and Linux would be the perfect base for something like that (as long as nobody ever saw it, a la TiVo). If you made it relatively pleasant to look at and could stand it up on an end table, you could sell it as an 'ever-changing picture frame' as well - the digital camera-toting generation down could send pictures to it, and it would display them as a screensaver.

One fairly important thing missing is how to handle hover/mouseover type links, given that there is no touchscreen equivalent for that - of course there are few other elements that would need to be set up right for touchscreen.

Now if only there was a relatively mature, well-supported, extensible open-source browser out there somewhere.

Oh. Right. So there is.

You know it's sad

[Andy Dodd]

When the original poster doesn't even bother to RTFA.

If you actually read the article, it becomes painfully clear that there is no "PSOne touchscreen" - The PSOne display is simply a cheap small display that he is placing behind a touchscreen that didn't come built in to a display. He does not make a SINGLE mention as to exactly what model of touchscreen he used, nor where to get it, and there is nothing preventing you from getting a touchscreen large enough to put on a normal LCD monitor (or a CRT for that matter), other than possibly cost. (He does mention the brand indirectly, apparently the touchscreens are made by eGalax, although looking at eGalax's website gives me the impression that they only make controller ICs for touch screens, not complete touchscreen units. They also do not have any U.S. based distributors listed.)

Re:Cool

[ozmanjusri]

I, for one, welcome our new PlayStation LCD touch screen-controlled robot overlords?

I don't. The single biggest problem with this project is that it requires a Sony product, and I aint gonna buy Sony products no more. I'll be doing my best to discourage others from buying them too.

Re:Obstacle to making Linux commercially viable

[chris_eineke]

Well, I suppose that if one invests hundreds of man-hours into a project without seeing it take off and accepted by a huge number of people, then one might tend to generalize that all similar projects are doomed to fail.

On the other hand, similar projects have been doing releases constantly and attracted a developer following of that the enlightenment community could only dream of.

Please don't understand me wrong. I am not bashing rasterman or the Enlightenment project. It just seems to me that the E. project has been making mistakes that they shouldn't have done; but I can't put my finger on what exactly they did wrong. :)