FlipTouch

IBM FlipTouch Display The FlipTouch display has four components that add together to one of the most interesting notebook display solutions ever: FlipTouch Touchscreen FlipTouch Buttons FlipTouch display mechanics FlipTouch support software The Touchscreen enables one to do point-and-click operations on the display. The FlipTouch Buttons provide TouchScreen access to display related and other hardware related functions. The FlipTouch display mechanics enable the user to flexibly use the display in several positions: covering the keyboard (like a TabletPC) standing upright on the notebook base behind the keyboard (like on a normal notebook) standing upright facing opposite the keyboard (being flipped over by 180 degrees) The FlipTouch software provides the neccessary software support like the TouchScreen driver, the on screen button panel and the software to flip the screen by 180 degrees.

This display solution was introduced and shelved with the TransNote.

Linux Support

The TouchScreen is a serial attached MicroTouch TouchBase TouchScreen. It is attached to the first serial port (/dev/ttyS0), which holds IO-Ports 3F8 to 3FF and IRQ 7.

The serial port needs to be configured with

# setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart 16550A port 0x03f8 irq 7 baud_base 115200 spd_normal skip_test .

There is a driver available (binary and source), which was originally written for XFree86 4.1, but successfully tested with xorg 6.8.2.

• Unpack the driver and copy transnote_drv.o to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input.
• There is a calibrate directory in the source tree. Quit your X server, go to that directory and run $ calibrate > ~/penconfig.
• It will guide you through the calibration and generate the neccessary configuration entries for xorg.conf.
• Now you just need to merge the contents of ~/penconfig into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
• Then restart your X server and you can use your pen to navigate the pointer.

NOTE!

The calibration process is not very precise, you might want to finetune the values in the "Touchscreen" InputDevice section.

Hint:

Further Information about the TouchScreens serial communications protocol can be found on

Ben "netjunki" Moores TransNote Development Notes.

The ThinkPad and Volume mute buttons on the right sight of the display work with tpb as on every other ThinkPad featuring those buttons. The TouchPanel button in the middle triggers neither tpb nor xev nor showkey. At least not with default configurations.

TODO	find out how to make the TouchPanel button usable

Models featuring this Technology

• ThinkPad TransNote