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Supporting the Next Window touch
hardware We are occasionally asked if we can supply drivers to
support the Next Window hardware and this document has been created to answer
this query. Next Window has been in the touch business for some time
and the original touch screens delivered a mass of touch data to the system
such that the receiving touch driver contained the algorithms needed to
interpret the data and identify the touch co-ordinates. Unfortunately we were never given access to these algorithms
and therefore were never able to support the earlier devices. We refer to
these devices as the bulk data type.
This type of touch screen was fitted to the Dell ST22210T and Lenovo ThinkVision L2461X monitors and is available from Next
Window in a few different guises. These devices need a separate touch driver to be
installed for them to work and are restricted to the drivers available from
Next Window More recently Next Window have released touch devices
whereby the algorithm intelligence is built into the firmware of the
controller so is able to deliver to the system data packets that contain X
and Y co-ordinate information. We believe most of these controllers to be HID
compatible so as to use the Windows HID driver which supports both single and
multi-touch input. We refer to these
devices as the PnP data type. We
have added support for some of these devices. Many years ago we had access to a prototype Next Window
device with X/Y data output that supported a very early incarnation of
multi-touch and we configured this under the controller name of ‘Next Window,
Human Touch, USB’ We’re not sure if
this was HID compatible or not. For some time after we added this support only bulk data
type controllers were released but both bulk and x/y are now available. To further complicate the situation, when plugged in to
different operating systems the device can adjust the data packet / stylus to
suite, so for XP it may send out a ‘Mouse’ packet, under Vista a ‘digitizer’
packet and Window 7 a ‘multi-touch’ packet. When a Next Window device is plugged into the system the
USB descriptor will show that the manufacturer’s ‘Vendor id’ for the device
is 1926. This id is unique to Next Window.
Given that a device manufacturer can potentially have more than one
USB device each device also carries a Product id. In the case of the Human
Touch device we initially supported this was 0003 but this is now used by a
different product. Regarding Next Window Product Ids, we are aware of the
following device. This table also shows the UPDD support status
Vendor and
Product id’s can be viewed on a system as per these examples: Windows:
http://ww5.touch-base.com/documentation/Identifying%20Touch%20Screen%20controllers.htm#_Windows Mac OS
X: http://ww5.touch-base.com/documentation/Identifying%20Touch%20Screen%20controllers.htm#_Mac_OS_X Linux: http://ww5.touch-base.com/documentation/Identifying%20Touch%20Screen%20controllers.htm#_Linux In theory we can add support for PnP type devices. To do this we can send a driver configured
for the correct Vendor and Product id such that our driver will take control
of the device. This driver can then be
used to capture touch data as described here: http://ww5.touch-base.com/documentation/Calibration-diag.htm If you have a PnP type device and would like support with
our driver then please let us know if you are in a position to try and
capture touch data as described above. Finally, supporting multi-touch in an operating system
other than Windows 7 requires that the device sends out MT packets
irrespective of host OS so the driver has to send the USB feature request to
enable MT output (make the device think it’s connected to a Windows 7
system!) |