The project is still going!

So today following the announcement that the Hackaday Prize contest is closing within the following 12 hours, I decided to submit the project to the contest and update the blog. Why not? Maybe I'll finally have some readers!

I haven't been allocating much time to the project since my last blog entry, however I do have some worthy updates.

I received a 15 inch touchscreen panel that I ordered from ebay, it came from Hong Kong and it took nearly a month to arrive. The packaging was a bit funny but .. hey, it arrived intact!

The touchscreen is detected in Linux as

0eef:0001 D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd eGalax TouchScreen

and works using the USB touchscreen driver in the kernel (CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_USB_COMPOSITE). I'll need to check later how to make the touchscreen device available as a X11 input (tslib)?

I also studied a bit which MCU to use for the project. There are quite a few places comparing the most common development boards for hobbyists. I was aiming for the Beaglebone Black but it was out of stock in most stores around here, so I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi. There are some reports of people running pulseaudio and midi software on it, so it should fit my needs. The Raspberry Pi also has support for a multitude of output resolutions which is important for me since I'm using a 14'' screen.

I would be already cross-compiling a Gentoo-based distribution for the Raspberry Pi if my laptop wasn't broken. After 5 years, my dv6535ep died with a burnt GPU (it is funny since I don't even game on it). I successfully brought it alive once using my hot air station but the GPU ended up failing again a few days later. Anyway, this is subject of another story!

So now I'm preparing the desktop for development since the laptop was my dev computer :'( I'm hoping in having more updates soon.