excellent guide, thanks a lot!

Good guide Chewy, thanks a lot. Now we have some idea of what is expected of us for a Xandros touch screen. Glad to see somebody finally got one working.
JDtucson

Thanks chewy. I followed your instructions and calibration ran well. After that it still doesn't work. The touchscreen I got is also from fido and worked perfectly under Windows. Got any idea?

Chewy, no I did not upgrade the controller. It's not an option on the eBay auction item that I bid. Maybe that's why it didn't work for me.

make a film and  put it on youtube
voila !
it wood be a good idear !
tku

chewy wrote:

p.s. did you buy the upgraded controller (extra $5).  it's supposed to have something altered in the chip's programming to make it work with xandros.  I know that people with the earlier controller had problems.

Does anyone know what he had to change in the controller firmware?  I didn't realise he was altering it for Xandros, so I've got one that doesn't work properly now.

I've been playing around with it though.  It's causing installation of the usbtouchscreen kernel module, creating a /dev/input/event6 device (which matches chewy's instructions).  The data stream it sends seems to consist of 16-byte packets - a 4-byte timestamp in seconds, a 4-byte sub-second time value (wraps at around 900,000), then data, in which you can clearly identify press/release events and coordinate changes.  It seems to only support one touch point, but at least the x/y coordinates are clearly coming through.  In practice, though, it looks like the X driver isn't receiving position data, so it just puts the cursor in the bottom left corner when you tap the panel.

Curiously, even after removing all drivers from my Xorg conf file, even for "mouse" and "synaptics", my touchpad still works, and the touch panel still manages to click.  I think it's reporting itself also as a standard HID device.  The documentation for the drivers does state that you need to choose one or the other - perhaps this is part of the problem.  I'll keep playing with it anyway - but it would be good to hear if anyone else has had any success, without fidodido's custom firmware.

I think in the worst case, we should be able to make this work using a custom X driver, but I really think we should be able to get it to work without.  I've also seen references online to getting these things to work under EEExubuntu, without using the vendor's drivers, just using standard kernel functionality, so that's another fall-back - I'd like to get the vendor drivers to work though, as the calibration thing looks useful.

When I get this sorted out, if I get time I'll upload an installation program that sets everything up for you.

no1knows wrote:

Even with all the xorg.conf settings as per pdf guide the Touchpad program still reports that the module is not installed correctly...

I found setting the driver to either usbauto or /dev/input/event6 worked - maybe you'd find event4 would work too.  I don't have any hiddevs, although the usbhid module is loaded.  I also don't have /dev/tkpanel0, but I haven't build the tkusb module, so that's expected.

There are a few things I don't understand yet.  I wish we had source code for the X driver!

Yes, the "Touchkit" program worked and let me run the calibration.  It could tell when I pressed on the panel, but it looks like it couldn't tell *where* I pressed.

I asked fidodido about the changes they make for Xandros compatibility, and he said it's a firmware patch, and he's trying to find out some details.  Fingers crossed!

It would be really helpful if somebody who does have the modified firmware could run a test.  If you're willing, disable your touch panel in your xorg.conf file and restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is enough), and then run this at a console:

xxd -g1 /dev/input/event6 > touchpanel_output.txt

Change the event number if it's wrong for your system.  Now if you tap on the panel it should print a lot of hex numbers to that file.  Please tap each corner in turn, releasing straight away, and waiting 2 seconds between corners.  Press Ctrl-C when you're done, and post or PM me the output.  I'm hoping to see whether the patched firmware is sending a significantly different data stream.

If the xxd command is not found, just use cat instead... it won't be human-readable, but I can run xxd on my end if necessary.

gfoot, sounds like you know what you're doing, i cant even get past the module not installed error when i run Touchkit... despite trying all those "Device" settings and confirming that event4 is the controller.
I'll wait and see on your pogress, i'm running Backtrack 3 by the way (a modified slack distro)

chewy:

I think you just need to comment out the line in the ServerLayout section.  You'll know if you got it right because if you didn't, the output file will be empty.  Thanks for trying it.

Another way to check is to run "fuser /dev/input/event6".  It will list the PIDs of any processes which are using that device.  Hopefully you'll see none.

no1knows:

It's possible that the Xorg module isn't compatible with your distro - you could check the log output of the X server (probably in /var/log) to check it didn't fail to load the module.  I'm not sure how to check whether a module is loaded by querying the server, but there must be a way - maybe someone else knows.  As you're running a different distro, it might be worth you trying this driver: http://www.conan.de/touchscreen/evtouch.html  It's the one that was suggested for EEExubuntu, which I've found doesn't quite work on Xandros due to a library version error.

I can now confirm that jeff's (fido-dido) modded controller also works under eeeXubuntu.

They are the same as these instructions in this thread, only they have a few random things that show up as $!# and whatnot.... But yeah, same as this thread.

the only thing i did different was: cat /proc/bus/input/devices/ to find the actual event# of my screen. My screen was event4. then after fallowing the guide and rebooting (not just restarting X) it worked. The calibration program is reallllly nice. has a 4 point or 25 point and numerous other options.

Really worth the extra 5$