Chris's Random Ramblings
Fri, 06 Feb 2004 - New toy
I picked up a 7" LCD touch screen on Ebay and it arrived today - very
fast shipping given it was sent from Hong Kong only 3 days ago. It's
widescreen and designed to be used in cars for watching videos and
playing games on, but I plan on installing it in my kitchen. I have
lots of recipes stored on electronically and I've been using my laptop
to display them whilst cooking. For some reason, mixing laptops and
cooking made my manager a bit nervous, so I've been looking around for
an alternative and a touch screen seems like the perfect solution.
The touch screen is USB driven and a bit of searching around the internet found a suitable driver on the manufacturer's website. Its pretty amazing that virtually every computer device you can buy these days has some form of linux support. It took a few hours of debugging to get it working. Firstly I accidentally used a different compiler to build the module than I originally used for the kernel which caused some rather wierd errors. The driver also was using the wrong vendor id (someone converted the hex value to decimal twice) and it took a while for me to work this out. It was a good learning experience and with Paulus's help I learnt quite a bit about usb device drivers.