Wacom ArtPad II (KT-0405-R) to USB

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1119141209 (1) Six or so years ago, I picked up a Wacom ArtPad II digitizer from Freecycle. It came with serial cable and power brick, but no pen. These devices aren’t like an iPad or whatever (which use a capacitative touchscreen) where you can use your finger or a cheap stylus. Wacom pens have built-in smarts to communicate with the tablet and relay pressure information, pen/eraser mode, button click, etc. Without the pen, it’s downright useless. A few eBay searches revealed that pens were crazy expensive to replace at the time. Into the spare bin it went.

Recently I had an interest in getting this working again. I did more research and found that Wacom pens are actually somewhat interchangeable – in this case I can use any “Penabled” pen on it, and it’ll probably work. The new Samsung Galaxy Note S tablet uses Wacom styluses and the replacements are cheap – $8 on eBay, so I ordered one. Holding the pen over the tablet causes the LED to switch from orange to green, which was good enough for me to figure it’s working.

New problem – I have no machines with a serial port any more, and even if I did, Wacom drivers don’t support serial tablets any more. The solution comes from the WaxBee project, which uses a Teensy 2.0 to sniff old-protocol tablet packets and re-encode them to emulate an Intuos2 (a modern USB tablet with driver support). Great! Ordered a Teensy and cracked open the tablet to set to work.

First, I knocked off the serial connector and voltage regulator (soldered across that instead), as the USB will provide the +5V needed to drive the tablet. Next step is removing the ADM202 TTL-to-RS232 chip, where things took a disastrous turn: my overeager Dremel application removed the chip as well as the pads it sat on, and gouged out some of the PCB to boot. Crud, now I have to follow traces to figure out where it was supposed to go. Took a couple high res photos and gave up for the night. (If you need more info – circuit board photos, etc – check out this series of posts: http://forum.bongofish.co.uk/index.php?topic=2088.msg20757#msg20757)

test The actual solution turned out not so bad: had to lift three pins on the Motorola chip and solder those to the Teensy. The hid_debug tool from pjrc (and associated WaxBee firmware) was invaluable in figuring out when I had the wires going the right way. Once that was done, superglue secured the wires and electrical tape held the Teensy. I cut a chunk off the side of the enclosure for the USB micro-port to fit, and drilled a hole for the Teensy button if I ever need to reprogram it. Covered with electrical tape, plugged it, and miraculously it all worked!

Crazy Taxi Garmin GPS Voice

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Here is a project I’d been talking about for years, but never actually pulled it off until recently. It’s a voice set for a Garmin GPS, which replaces the default “narrator” with the obnoxious announcer from Crazy Taxi.
All voice clips were pulled from the PC version of the game, which had them in convenient .wav format already. Some trim / normalize with Audacity and import into Garmin Voice Studio to assemble together. I wanted to do more than just the announcer, but didn’t have any luck with that… there just weren’t enough clips to make it happen.

Here’s a video of the system in action:

I hosted all the downloadables on archive.org. You can get it from here:
https://archive.org/details/Garmin-CrazyTaxiVoice

cfg_parse on Sourceforge

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cfg_parse Icon cfg_parse, that tiny config parser I wrote a few months back, has now been moved to Sourceforge. I also took the time to make some Doxygen comments and generate a manual for it. No major bugs were found but a couple minor tweaks help tighten up the release.

Check it out here: http://cfg-parse.sourceforge.net

The easiest, easiest way to use this is to add it as a subversion externals for your project – that way it will automatically get checked out with the rest of your code, and you can build it right in! The syntax would be something like…
svn:externals svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/cfg-parse/code/trunk cfg_parse .

Teeny Tiny MIDI Controller

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I’ve been working sporadically on this tiny MIDI controller.  It targets the smallest PIC microcontroller available with onboard A/D converter – the PIC10F220.

Currently it reads two potentiometers and a button input using three of the GPIO pins, and it bitbangs the remaining output pin to produce MIDI-Out at 31250hz using cycle-counted delays.  Since practically everything is already on-chip, this thing could just be epoxied straight to the enclosure.  There are only two or three more components – no PCB required!

schemThis microcontroller sports a whopping 256 instructions and 16 bytes of RAM.  Even so, the MIDI controller code consumes less than half the available resources after a modest amount of optimization for size.  One might see this as my response to using a certain 32k ROM / 2k RAM microcontroller to blink some lights, but I won’t admit to being that petty.

mplabWhat to do with the remaining space?  An easter egg isn’t a bad idea…  Hold the button down on boot, and the controller will dump “HTTP://WWW.HACKADAY.COM” as a series of MIDI note-on messages.

Unfortunately I haven’t built the thing yet, but I did simulate it.  Here’s the logic analyzer input, showing MIDI messages being sent (delays removed):

plot_editYou can listen to the result here: EasterEgg.mid

Code follows.

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GregerQuest

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gqTitle
Before there was World of Warcraft, there was Everquest. I never played it but I had a buddy in college who did: he talked about how amazing the MMO genre was, with all its social aspects, technical quirks, and just plain cool experiences.

Naturally it inspired me to make my own clone. In Visual Basic. With 2d graphics and piping everything through the Winsock .ocx control. Full of programmer art made with a pirated copy of Bryce 3d.

gqChars

Ah, the wide-eyed days of a young programmer in a rapidly expanding genre. It’s like I was playing out every cliche of the Gamedev.net newbie at once. The one thing I had going for me, though, was a thorough understanding of the impossibility of such a project – and a sense of humor about it all. For example, I often joked that the only enemies were going to be Gelatinous Cubes, because that would be easy to render. I once wrapped a photo of my roommate’s face on a sphere to use for a hideous player character head. And so on. Eventually I got about as far as a character select screen, with a couple songs, before giving up and moving on to something else.

Unlike SlugFest, this is one that isn’t ever going to get off the ground. If anyone is interested in the art and music resources, you can have them: hereby released into the Public Domain.

shore

This isn’t my only brush with the MMO genre. Later on some friends and I tried another take on it (“Draconis”) as the U of A Game Dev club project – with a result somewhat similar to The Mana World, and it once held up to five players online simultaneously. The real killer for these kind of games is the sheer amount of content required. Though Draconis worked technically, all the content in the world was viewable at first login. Hardly a compelling MMO experience.

Download GregerQuest Resources: .ZIP file, 1.9mb.