For this couple weeks, I got an opportunity for playing with new gadgets. They are Logitech QuickCam E 3500, Wacom Bamboo Digital Pad, and a Fingerprint Reader. As Wacom is the only gadget that successfully and flawlessly running in my machine, then this post will talk much about it. I will give a brief review about Logitect Webcam too, more like unsuccessfull report actually .

My primary workstation runs on openSUSE 11.1 with 2.6.27 kernel. I plugged in the Logitect Webcam and voila!, it was recognized! I launched Cheese only to find that the Webcam cannot be found . I googled and found that I need to install uvcvideo driver. Unfortunately, it has not been updated to the latest openSUSE 11.1’s kernel patch. SO, am forced to downgrade my kernel to the original kernel version included in openSUSE 11.1. I launched Cheese, and voila! I got the Webcam worked! I took some pictures that you can see below:

Since I need to integrate this Webcam into our java application, I started to search for some libraries related to Webcam. I found Java Media Framework from Sun Microsystem and it looked very promising. I tried the sample code and get a message that the Webcam was not found *again. After reading some references, I decided to give the Webcam to my friend who runs Windows in his workstation. The Webcam was detected flawlessly and the sample code can run without any problems! D*mn, linux has to work hard to catch with other OS in this kind of stuff.

After having bad experince with Webcam, I chose to give Wacom digital tablet a try. It was easy to use Wacom in openSUSE. All you have to do is launching YaST, choose Graphic and Video Card module. You will find Tablet entry on the left panel. Just click “Activate this Tablet” and choose your Tablet vendor. In my case, I chose Wacom and Graphite (using USB) as the model. Save the configuration, restart the X Server and your Tablet is ready to use.

As I previously mentioned, I had to integrate these gadgets into our application. I used Jpen library to help me work with the Tablet. JPen is a Java library which provides java interface to Digital Tablet hardwares. It is actively developed and its latest version was released 14th of September. So, if you ask me whether it has a good support, I will say yes. They are working in MacOS X library so you can build a cross-platform application using this library. JPen contains providers for Linux (XInput), Windows (wintab) and the mouse (java AWT mouse).

Using JPen, I can easily embed a Canvas object into my application and voila!, I can draw anything on that Canvas. JPen also give you capabilities to control your pen. You can set pressure limit for your Pen, or helping you differ between mouse pointer and pen pointer. You can see the JPen in action below:

Unfortunately, you can not see anything written, since I do not have my Tablet now, but I will update the screenshot as soon as I have the Wacom tablet with me.

Playing with new hardware is fun. You will get a lot of new informations. It was a great adventure, and I am looking forward to see how far my workstation can handle

these new hardwares