Free tablets as in pay for shipping! Sorry US only

I sent in my payment and just got my shipping info. Thanks for posting about this guys, I only actually found out when Doug posted in the LightBurn forum.

Hoping to put a unit at each laser cutter, and perhaps one per unit/ rack of 3D Printers.

I was also thinking about home automation panels - I got some Kindle Fire tablets for this over the winter holidays, but no matter.

Now to conjure that which is most precious - extra free time.

2 Likes

I am glad we are able to feed your hacking needs!
Donā€™t forget to join the Google forum, link above. A lot of great information there on these tablets.

I finally own a benchtop power supply and used it to power up the first tablet. I used hot air and super fine tip soldering iron to remove (read: melt away) the battery connector and solder wires to the terminals.

Iā€™ve installed LB on the stock Linux Mint and used Dougā€™s guidance to make it all fit.

A few quick questions:

I managed to remove the bottom ā€œtaskbarā€ (I believe this is called a launcher?) how can I get the default one back?

The interface works well with a mouse, but when I touch the screen it is moreso moving the cursor relatively, as opposed to actually putting the cursor at my finger position and clicking (the way a touchscreen would normally work). Did anyone else experience this?

I havenā€™t gotten as far as PopOS yet. First time bench-powering and soldering at the new place and it took less than a year!

3 Likes

try putting this into a script/file called auto-rotate, make executable and run it in a terminal to see if it solves your cursor problem. As for the launcher, I donā€™t know how you removed it but I would do the opposite. Myself, I tended to have it hide and auto-show when the cursor is at the screen edge.
But thatā€™s with KDE, not Mint XFCE.

#!/bin/sh
#----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# The script below was modified from: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=278448
#   to work for the HackADay tablets from Vulcan
#
# Note that inotify-tools needs to be installed, e.g. from the Software Manager
#   to provide the monitor-sensor command
#
#----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Auto rotate touch screen based on device orientation for Dell XPS-13 (9365)
# adapted by Cristiano Bozza
#
#   Based on chadm's script at https://linuxappfinder.com/blog/auto_screen_rotation_in_ubuntu.

# Receives input from monitor-sensor (part of iio-sensor-proxy package) and sets the touchscreen
# orientation based on the accellerometer positionn. We assume that the display rotation is
# handled by Linux Mint 18.1, Cinnamon 3.2.7. If this is not the case, add the appropriate
# xrandr command into each case block.

# Notice the device number name was obtained by running:
# > xinput
# and reading the output, which for the HackADay tablet includes:
#
# āŽ” Virtual core pointer                                    id=2        [master pointer  (3)]
# āŽœ   ā†³ Virtual core XTEST pointer                      id=4        [slave  pointer  (2)]
# āŽœ   ā†³ Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen                      id=12        [slave  pointer  (2)]
# + other lines

# This script should be added to startup applications for the user.

# Kill any existing monitor-sensor instance, for example if manually invoking
# from a terminal for testing.
killall monitor-sensor

# Launch monitor-sensor and store the output in a RAM based file that can be checked by the rest of the script.
# We use the RAM based file system to save wear where an SSD is being used.
monitor-sensor > /dev/shm/sensor.log 2>&1 &

# Initialise display orientation to 'normal'
# Without this, the display often starts in 'inverted' (or 'bottom-up') mode!
xrandr --output eDP1 --rotate normal
xinput set-prop 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1

# Parse output of monitor sensor to get the new orientation whenever the log file is updated
# Possibles are: normal, bottom-up, right-up, left-up
# Light data will be ignored

while inotifywait -e modify /dev/shm/sensor.log; do

# Read the last few lines that were added to the file and get the last orientation line.
ORIENTATION=$(tail /dev/shm/sensor.log | grep 'orientation' | tail -1 | grep -oE '[^ ]+$')

# Set the actions to be taken for each possible orientation
case "$ORIENTATION" in

normal)
# orient display
xrandr -o inverted
# orient touchscreen
xinput set-prop 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' -1 0 1 0 -1 1 0 0 1;;

bottom-up)
xrandr -o normal
xinput set-prop 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1;;

right-up)
xrandr -o right
xinput set-prop 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 0 1;;

left-up)
xrandr -o left
xinput set-prop 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1;;
esac
done

# On stopping this script, don't forget that "monitor-sensor" is still running - hence the "killall" !
2 Likes

I donā€™t see the ā€˜onboardā€™ keyboard icon on the task bar. If you donā€™t expect to have a keyboard and mouse connected at all times, you can add the on-screen keyboard with:
sudo apt install -y inotify-tools onboard

1 Like