Part 1 - 8th June, the sickness strikes.

For ages I’ve been visiting the Wacom site gazing at the very lovely Cintiq range.

This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool.  The price however makes me weep, £2000ish  for the 20” version.  They also do a thing called the PL at 17” for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.

Then I had one of those “spang” moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together.   My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?

Experiment – what depth does a tablet work to? Stack of paper says 9mm before accuracy starts to suffer noticeably. An LCD with an EL film backlight has to be thinner than that.

So here’s the challenge, What is the least amount of money I can build a Cintiq style device for?

NOW HEAR THIS.

So there are thousands of people reading this page.  You folks need to know this , seriously.  This is NOT a tutorial, this is just my experiences. There are still some issues with the design which will affect the order of doing things a bit.   I've fitted a fan and logged it in the "revisions" section, Also be aware that the gods of silicon are vengeful and often require a sacrifice before granting the boon of a working project. Lots of builds take two. Mucking around with electrical stuff can be dangerous, especially anything involving an inverter, (like monitor backlights). They can bite and believe me it hurts dammit. If you accidentally blow up your goldfish don't blame me.

FORUM

Anyhow I started a forum so that anyone who wants to have a go can have source of experience and support, see build logs, monitor strips, that sort of thing. It's been running for a couple of years now and It would be great to see you there and joining in.   If you've got any questions then please do come and ask them there.

The Wacom Cintiq.
A thing of beauty,
Excuse me, I’ve got to go and
lie down for a minute.
(This image copyright Wacom.)

The Depth Test
The Whole 9mm