multi-touch-dev team mailing list archive

["Henrik Rydberg" <rydberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Florian,

> I've written an open-source driver for the Microsoft Surface 2.0 touch
> screen, which is available here: https://github.com/floe/surface-2.0/

Great stuff! Yesterday, I was wondering when something like this would
appear. :-)

> Video of the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-JNqTY_3b0
> 
> Thanks to the guys at LMU (http://www.mimuc.de/), I had the opportunity
> to play with one for a bit and the result is what you can find above.
> 
> Of course, using this requires you to boot Linux on your Surface 2.0 in
> the first place. However, since it's just a regular PC, I've found that
> easier than expected: just boot Ubuntu from an USB harddisk and you
> don't even have to modify anything on the original Win7 installation.
> 
> Ubuntu 11.10 works surprisingly well: all hardware works out-of-the box,
> with the single exception being the touchscreen. Well, not anymore. ;-)

This is great news indeed.

> There are a few white spots left in the protocol (most of it is pretty
> straightforward, but a few things have eluded me). If someone else has
> access to a MS Surface 2.0, I'd be happy to get some feedback.

Ok.

> NB: right now, the provided tools just display the data and don't pass
> it on to Linux, so interaction with utouch isn't possible right now. But
> I hope I'll get around to writing an uinput bridge next week. If
> somebody could point me to a recent uinput example for multitouch, that
> would be awesome.

Better yet, from the protocol details, it looks like it would be
straight-forward to write an MT driver directly.

Thanks for sharing!

Henrik