touch solutions offered by toradex for windows embedded compact

Overview of Touch Solutions offered by Toradex for Windows Embedded Compact

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 2Aug’15

CHAIRMANTouch is an exciting technology. Nowadays, touch is a vital

feature like keyboard/keypad, mouse, etc. for any device. It

has changed the way a user interacts with the devices. The

user can sense the effect of their touch by gauging the

device’s response. Touch connects users to the device more

closely.

|www.toradex.com Toradex® is a registered trademark of Montadex GmbH 05/02/2023 3

Toradex offers different types of touch solutions for different interfaces.


In this presentation, I will give you an overview of the touch solutions

offered by Toradex.

Resistive touch

The Colibri and Apalis computer modules come with an interface for 4-

wire and 5-wire resistive touch screen. The driver for this interface is

already included in our preinstalled Win CE/Linux standard images. For

more information, see Resistive Touch Screen.

Note: 5-wire resistive touch is not supported by all modules. Please refer the

specifications of the Colibri and Apalis families to know about the supported

resistive touch types.

https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/resistive-touch-screen

https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/colibri-arm-family

https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/apalis-arm-family


Capacitive touch

I2C/SPI Capacitive multi-touch device

Most of the multi-touch or single-touch capacitive touch devices support

an I2C interface, while the other type of devices come with an SPI

interface. The communication protocols of these devices are not

standardized, so Toradex is not able to offer a capacitive touch driver that

runs out-of-the box with its Board Support Packages. If you are developing

a multi-touch driver for a new touch controller, then you need to have a

good knowledge of Windows CE & stream driver’s structure, use of the

platform builder, etc. So, creating a driver from scratch requires a lot of

time to be spent in development and debugging.

https://www.toradex.com/operating-systems/windows-ce


To simplify this process, Toradex has developed an architecture, which we

call, ‘Capacitive multi-touch solution’. It helps you to easily adapt our

capacitive multi-touch driver to any particular touch hardware. Unlike

other device drivers, the "Unified Multi-Touch driver" makes no hardware

access to the "Multi-touch device" or any other hardware. The Unified

Multi-Touch driver is a part of the kernel.


The "Multi-Touch Hardware Adaption" runs as an application. It

communicates with the "Multi-Touch Device" with or without using standard

Toradex libraries. The main job of the "Multi-Touch Hardware Adaption" is to

read the status and touch position from the "Multi-Touch" device and send it

to the "Unified Multi-Touch Driver".

The main advantage of this concept is that the whole communication to the

Multi-Touch Device is implemented as an application. As the source code

example of "Multi-Touch Hardware Adaption" is freely available, you can

easily adapt this example to another multi-touch device, which you are using

in your project.

For more detailed information see Multi-Touch Solution.

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/capacitive-multi-touch-solution-source-code

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/capacitive-multi-touch-solution-source-code


Toradex also offers full-fledged Multi-Touch Display Kits. You can use these

kits to quickly ramp up the development even before your actual hardware is

developed. With a little more added effort, we can configure the multi-touch

solution to support only single-touch with gestures.

I2C/SPI Capacitive Single-Touch Driver

Please note: We are no longer supporting this driver.

The capacitive single-touch driver supports one-finger touch operation and

emulates mouse events in Windows CE. In contrast to a real mouse, these

drivers use absolute coordinates.

http://developer.toradex.com/product-selector/capacitive-multi-touch-display



Customers can fix the cursor area and virtual button area inside the active touch sensitive portion.


It is a useful feature to have when products don’t need hardware buttons. A

software button can easily be assigned to generate key codes with the

press of a touch button, which is just like pressing a button on a real

keyboard. These key events will be sent to GWES.

Key features of the single-touch driver:

•A touch inside the cursor area is transformed into a regular mouse event

•A touch inside the button area is handled in a special way

•Any touch outside the cursor and button area is ignored

•The coordinate system of the cursor area (origin and orientation) can be

adjusted to match the display


For more information about Capacitive Single Touch driver, see here.

Customers should use the existing available drivers as-is available for

download from our developer website. If a customer wants to customize

our driver, please contact our support team. We are providing very limited

support on the driver customization. These drivers are not allowed to be

ported to any other Windows Embedded Compact versions and modules.

In the future, we intend to add these features to the Multi-Touch Solution.

USB HID Touch

Some capacitive touch devices are interfaced with USB HID class mouse

protocol or custom protocol (touch).

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/capacitive-single-touch-driver

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/capacitive-single-touch-driver



This hardware can send touch events to the host/device as mouse protocol

or the real touch position.

We have taken the mouse as base driver and tweaked it to support the USB

touch. You can get more details on this here: USB HID Touch. This driver

will get the touch positions from hardware and then convert them to their

relative mouse events, which will then be sent to GWES.

Customers can buy USB-based touch devices from the market and connect

it directly to a Toradex SOM plugged on a carrier board. The touch should

work instantly. If the touch is not working, then follow the troubleshooting

procedure to make it work. If the problem persists, contact the Toradex

support team to get dedicated support. As of now, USB HID Touch supports

single-touch. Multi-Touch support is not yet available.

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/usb-hid-touch

https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules

http://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/usb-hid-touch#Troubleshooting


Touch GesturesWindows Embedded Compact supports gestures from Windows CE6 R3 onwards. Windows CE6 supports only single-touch with gestures. Windows Embedded Compact 7 and 2013 support gestures that are single-touch, dual-touch symmetrical, and multi-touch with two contact points.The standard gestures recognizer supports PAN, SCROLL, SELECT, DOUBLE SELECT, and HOLD. Using external or plug-in gesture recognizer, ZOOM, and ROTATE gestures are possible.

Gestures are supported only by the Multi-touch Solutions offered by Toradex.

Capacitive Single-Touch driver and USB HID Touch driver don’t support gestures.

To know more about Windows Embedded Compact supported gestures, refer here.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj838851.aspx


Thank you!

touch solutions offered by toradex for windows embedded compact

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