22" & 12x19 build! -The Exotiq

[metapharsical]

I've just begun my overly ambitious build with wacom's biggest tablet!   

EDIT: Finished pictures on page 5

If all goes well, I wanna make the case and stand something of a piece of work as well.  I'm building it to be floor-standing with articulation for tilit and rotation of the tablet-screen.  I will engineer for form as well as function. H.R.Giger or a blasphemous reinventing of H.P.Lovecraft as cyberpunk will be my intended design.
I see it now: A cyber-beast-of-burden, arisen from the depths of Robot-Hell... Shackled by serial cables... Transmuted into a uberCool ! human interface bot  ! 


So far:

• received my 22-inch LG L226WTQ-BF $140 (curse Ebay shill bidders...).  Tested, works beautifully!
• stripped monitor, and it still works!   
• placed intact intuos3 6x8 under screen to test interference with no shielding: average from what I've seen from other builds (est. about 10-20 pixels of jitter when pen is near circuits along top of screen.  At bottom of the screen, it's about 2-4 pixels!! )
• waiting for intuos3 12x19 $350 from craigslist seller.  Scheduled to arrive by the 23rd

I'll post some pictures here of the monitor stripped so you guys can see what all the naughty bits look like...
FYI: Since the power supply is internal and the backlighting (CCFL) drivers are on the same board, this is not an ideal monitor for a build, but what the hell, I'll make it work...
It looks like I shouldn't need to extend the cable which sends the video signal to the big circuit board along the top of the screen.  It would be nice to be able to extend the wires to the CCFL tubes, but people doing this have reduced the brightness of the tubes.  Something with the fact that the wires are carrying such HIGH voltage that it causes them to act as capacitors.


wish me luck!!

[metapharsical]

If you wanna see the guts of a 22" LG panel from the perspective of a crappy cell phone camera:
http://s488.photobucket.com/albums/rr248/metapharsical/

Instead of dumping them in the forum, me hopes this is more convenient.

[elin]

Awesome!!! Good luck!

[Drewid]

I'm liking that stand as well.  That deserves honours if you manage to pull it off.

[metapharsical]

Alrighty then... Start polishing my trophy 

It's going to take me awhile to make the stand: a rough estimate of machining time is about 8 hours per vertebrae piece!
8 x 12 = an F-ing long time!
I'll be making them using a machine that doesn't remove material using a conventional spinning cutter (CNC mill), but instead uses an electrified wire .010 inches thick (Wire EDM).
It cuts very slow, but it will allow me to make the pieces very thin and lightweight...

I got my practically-new intuos3 today and promptly dissassembled it.

Two circuit boards: Giant sensor board and another sizable board that the usb cable plugs into.

I'll post pictures if I can borrow my friend's digital camera, my cell phone just isn't cutting it...



Stacked everything up, plugged it in, booted computer and HAZAA!
I sorta have a working DIY Cintiq!!!

I decide to disconnect everything and put it away for the night and I should have taken it to heart someone's suggestion to have a place were you can set everything up nice and safe, and not have to move anything around ever
I am forcefully humbled before the gods of silicon as I accidentally sever atleast one of the wires that goes from the LCD's logic board to the daughter board that drives the pixels.  Its this cable with 27 wires and plastic connectors at both ends.
I was being extra careful removing the plug, but my needle nose pliers slips and I clamp down on the bundle of wires   
I haven't found any replacements online, but I'll be able to fix it, just a few wires to solder.
It gives me time to stop and think about other stuff like building the case and buying shielding materials...  Instead of just coming home from work and playing with my naked-tiq 
A small penance to the gods of wacom for my blasphemy... 

[Drewid]

Any jitter?  How think is the backlight?  You mean it just worked???

Those plastic connectors can be very fragile, rolling them out with a scalpel blade is the best bet, checking to find the little clips that hole them in.


and PICS dammit, this is the BIGGEST EVAR   

[metapharsical]

NEW PICS http://s488.photobucket.com/albums/rr248/metapharsical/
My friend loaned me his super nice digital camera to document the first sighting of this beast IN ACTION!   
I'll be borrowing another friend's camcorder so you can see some video this weekend!

I was able to solder the broken wire going to the screen driving board.  I meticulously checked all  27 wires to be sure there were no other broken ones and I lucked out.

I set it up again, this time with the power and video boards underneath the wacom as it would be finally assembled...

No surprise, the jitter was worse than before when I had it set up with the boards off to the sides, even though I had grounded the aluminum foil over the screen driver board along the top.
So I disconnected everything, VERY VERY CAREFULLY.  Then I placed the power and video/logic boards inside their sheetmetal box that they were assembled in from the monitor, and I put the tablet and screen back ontop.
This probably benefited me two fold by grounding the boards and shielding their EMF.

Jitter was much improved.  It's still there, but only about 8-12 pixels at its worst.

Hey Drew!
Tomorrow I'll remember to bring home my caliper to measure the backlight thickness and pen read-height    
I wish the backlight was thinner! The pen only starts to read about 1-2mm away from the screen
And I really don't want to choose between an unprotected screen or a Cintiq that doesn't work... 

EDIT:  I guess I didn't have something grounded or shielded proper
Read Height with CCFLs plugged in :  7mm
Read Height with CCFLs unplugged:  12mm
Read Height with LED backlighting: To Be Determined 

[Rayall]

Don't forget, in the system preferences (or I guess for a pc, the control panel), once you install the driver, you can change the settings. When I did that with the iBook the jitter was gone, and there was no lag. 

[Drewid]

In theory you could polish the front of the backlight slab down a bit.   Oh and do feel free to post the pictures here, there's no problem with space or bandwidth on the server.

There's a thread on jitter here -> http://forum.bongofish.co.uk/index.php?topic=209.0

with various solutions that people have used.

[metapharsical]

So I take it some of the successful builds have eliminated jitter almost completely?

I have read that thread about jitter (about half a dozen times now...    :'( )
There's a few more things I'm gonna try:

• I haven't grounded the wacom sensor board to anything -do that.
• I removed the giant metal sheet from behind the wacom board, do people leave this behind the sensor board and ground it???
• I have some ~3mm thick copper sheet at work I can use to make a well formed shield around the top LCD board(copper=good conducter, good conductor of EMF? ??)
• Shield the power supply even MORE!
• Bury a big metal pole in the yard and run a cable to my ground wire  

On another note,
I measured the thickness of the backlight diffuser...   6mm
I remember you mentioned polishing down the diffuser in a thread, but even if I did that, I'd have to perform surgery on the backlights since they are a fraction taller than the slab itself...
I saw someone here dissect their CCFL enclosures, but I think that was because they HAD to in order to strip their monitor.  I'd just as well leave them.
I could go the extra mile and do like AmbiDextrose's LED backlight driver, as well, use his great shielding ideas...
I think the answer to more read height is in shielding...

P.S. I present to you the EXO-TIQ  in its birth-day suit!       (polarizer set on camera so the screen doesn't appear so bright and my mouse is visible for scale...)

[metapharsical]

Oh I forgot to mention some of the things I have tried to eliminate jitter...

• monitor only allows two refresh rates- 59 and 60mhz, lowering resolution helps alot but F- that!
• unpluging backlights- Helps a lot with jitter and pen drop-out
• rotating power supply- can't rotate a full 90deg because of short CCFL cables. second reason to change to LEDs!

OH!, Rayall is right! I forgot to set the report rate of the tablet to slow (finally found the setting in wacom window), will try that tonight...
[/list]

Thanks again Drew and to all the others that have added so much to this awesome board!

[Rayall]

When I did the iBook, and set the prefs, there was no lag or jitter. But, even when I recently got the Digimemo there was somewhat of a jitter, which was another reason I returned it. And they did not include a driver where you could set your own prefs, don't know what they were thinking. 

They even had a slight problem with the modbook with the lag, but if they set the prefs it probably would have been fine.

I edited this since I see you said you will reset the prefs.

[Drewid]

Definitely stick the metal plate back behind the sensor, that might make a big difference and copper is a great metal for shielding, or if you use lead foil then it'll be radiation proof as well. (can't be too careful).

[metapharsical]

Here's the weekend update:

Went in to work after-hours and cut a few pieces of metal:


Here are 3 of the ~12 vertebrae pieces I have so far for the stand.  I might cut the two thicker ones into two so then I'll have 5 and I'm almost half way there!  They aren't polished yet so they look kinda rusty, that's just the way they come out of the machine.
I think I'll sand-blast them so they have a matte silver finish that looks like metal-bone...



I also cut 2 pieces of 3mm (1/8 inch) copper plate to sandwich the top circuit of the LCD.  It helps.  Jitter is down to ~4 pixels right near the circuit!

About shielding:  I put the wacom metal shield back (underneath the wacom case, touching the sheetmetal enclosure for the monitor boards).
Jitter was a improved a bit, but I had problems with the pen dropping out and it would take 5-10 seconds for it to be recognized again...
I took it back out and it is fine again...
I think I'll try placing it where it's supposed to be (directly under the sensor board), before I throw it away....

And another thing.  In my wacom preferences it has 4  pens recognized (sometimes less than four).  If I delete them, they're gone for awhile then, they reappear when I'm not looking   
Not a big deal, but has anyone had this occur?
Could be my ^WAY outdated computer with its woefully inadequate 250W power supply cannot handle the extra burden of the dual-monitor video and the 12x19 wacom.

[Drewid]

4 pens?    errrm.  Not come across that one before. 

The rear shield is grounded straight onto the wacom power input on mine, I don't know if that would make a difference.

Those vertibrae are the coolest thing I've seen for a long time.