Wacom Tablets

vvvv beta general
1

Hi,

any idea how i can get the data from a wacom graphic tablet into vvvv? it seems there is no support for wacom input in vvvv? any plans to support it in the future?

it seems the only possibility to to directly use a wacom in vvvv is to code the rs232 protocol in vvvv directly.

2

as long as you´re not happy with the mouse emulation of the tablet, using rs232 would be the best option. i have done that at least once (in max) so´d say its quite possible and easier in vvvv (at least if your tablet still has an rs232 output)
i dont have the mac around to open the old patches though. i think the protocol was based on a simple sequence of bytes containing x, y and pressure. see the rs232 hacking section on the documentation page.

michel was playing around with an HID driver within an vvvv node, so perhaps this could be an option here as well. michel?

3

as far as i know, the extended features of a wacom tablet (tilt, tool-id, etc) without special drivers. i’m not even sure, if the wacom works as a HID device.

i have a serial wacom, so i guess it should be quite possible to make a patch in vvvv, especially, if you only need to support one model. i tried to get some information about the protocol from the linux wacom driver sources, but i’m not a c programmer (and a very good programmer in general). in fact it is just a simple sequence of bytes, but i don’t know how to interpret them. also you need to send some init sequence to the wacom (iirc there are at leat two modes the tablet is running at, with an intuos)

4

install the SerMon program from HHD Software http://www.hhdsoftware.com/sermon.html (Note there is a free trial version) Install your wacom driver and record the data stream on the rs232 port. this will most likely give you all the information you need like initialization strings, baud rate etc. Now unintall your wacom drivers and use the Tokenizer node within vvvv to split the byte stream from RS232 into packets, and Ord to make values out of the bytes.

5

can you test if the wacom actually is a HID device? i have enclosed a small test program, which enumerates the registered devices. please post your result.
in case it is, this would give one additional reason for having a generic HID node.

6

sebastian,

i only have wacom tablets with rs232 connectors. afaik you always need some driver to get the full functionality of the wacom tablets. but maybe they also work with some limitations as a HID.

maybe the sources of the linux drivers gives some answers
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/linuxwacom/linuxwacom-dev/src/

7

i found two components, which maybe could be easily used with vvvv:

http://jan.hlavenka.cz/software.php?lng=1&detail=3

both are using wintab, which is the defacto standard for any graphic tablet on windows.

8

excellent links. i will look into this…

do you have your rs232 wacom with wintab drivers running?

9

the wacom works fine with the wintab drivers.

i haven’t figured out how to get my wacom to run with the RS232, but i also haven’t tried too hard.

if you’re going to do a wintab node, i will not spent more time in getting the tablet working with the rs232 node.

10

dont expect anything to soon. the rs232 / tokenizer / ord combo will be your friend.

11

dont expect anything to soon.