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Advices on using large touch screen monitor (not panel with OS)

Since I am not sure what would be the appropriate board for this, I just put it here 🙂

Recently we build up like 1-2 new experimental rig per year. The base of my GUIs always come from a piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) which I use as a background on my FP. I create the active parts as needed for the UI, like custom picture rings (3 states) for the hand valves, other symbols for Mass flow controllers, pressure/temperature sensors, vacuum pumps, etc. See below a small example screenshot (a small cut out of a large GUI), plus custom controls for white background GUI.

 

Everything is ok, and I develop these systems without any problem (I know there is the DSC toolkit for such applications, but we do not need "that much" industrial level/approach). However, recently I started to think about how cool it would be to use not only a large monitor as now, but one with a touchscreen connected to the system PC (laptop or desktop with Win7 OS). Actually there is not only the cool factor, but easy usage: for example during an experimental protocol the operator(s) need to change hand valve positions very frequently. The operator moves along the experimental rig (large physical dimensions) and between the PC keyboard+mouse, so it is not that comfortable if the table is small, you need to find the mouse, after you try to find the mouse pointer on the large screen, your wrist hurts after a while because of the mouse if you do all this standing, etc... 🙂

Ok, end of background story, sorry if I pulled it long, anyway, this is breakpoint 🙂

 

So I am seeking advice from those who dealt with touchscreen interfaces. So I do not want to use a panel with built-in OS, but a large touch screen monitor connected to my PC. I guess most of the things should work out-of-the-box, like a touch emulates a mouse click, etc... But I am interested in how I could maximise user experience with my LabVIEW app running on such touch monitor? Any advice / crazy idea is welcome! 🙂

 

example_P&ID.png

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Actually I even do not know how these touch screen monitors interface to PC? I guess via a USB port? Since a VGA port or other display port cannot transfer touch data back to PC, right?

 

I have found this thread: http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/touch-screen-monitor/m-p/3009681/highlight/true#M861046

Now I understand that after installing a touch screen monitor, it will also act as a second mouse, so it should capture touches as clicks or double clicks. I am more interested in advanced options, like "touch gestures" (zoom in/out, slide, etc), and how to intercept these from a LV Event structure...? I guess it should depend also on the driver of the touch screen...

 

edit: I guess if the touch monitor driver could map certain gestures into different mouse button clicks of the definied virtual mouse, these different mouse button values could be easily intercepted in LV Event Structure...?

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We're using touch screens in most of our applications - it's quite comfortable for users 🙂 Most touch screen monitors have USB output (that is -  which acts as mouse in system, so simple events like clicks are easy to capture in LabVIEW. As for more advanced events (gestures, etc), it highly depends on the touch screen type and its controller/driver - touch screen for example must allow multi-touch, and controller/driver must translate this multitouch into proper system event. And then there is a problem with LV event structure, which support only a few mouse events. I rember Swish toolkit by Richard Thomas (https://forums.ni.com/t5/Certified-LabVIEW-Architects/Swish-source-code/td-p/3507562) which does some more interesting things with gestures. You might want to check it out.

 

If you want to use touch screen in industrial applications, just remember that some of them (like resistive ones) woks even when you wear gloves, and some (like capacitive) doesn't. You also need to consider things like "working area" of the screen - some touch screens doesn't work well at the edges of the screen, so you might want to design your GUI to include proper margins.

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Thanks for info, I will check that link too!

Actually in our case it is not industrial environment, but more laboratory. We test small and (semi-) technical scale technologies in lab environment. So that is why I am looking for not a hard rugged industrial touch panel, but a nice cost effective large touch monitor (no need for special protection for the monitor, etc)...

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I've never used any of these (no touch screens in my project yet), but there are a couple of toolkits as well that I would hope make interfacing easier.

 

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/212474

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/209858

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Thanks! I will test it when I get a touch monitor.

 

edit: Seems it would give me all required features... 🙂

http://www.aledyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Touchscreen-Toolkit.pdf

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OK so you said wild ideas appreciated..  You are realy goint to love this thenSmiley Very Happy

 

At a former client I had the following set-up for development:

  • 2 full sized monitors
  • Laptop with a touchscreen
  • external keyboard mouse and headset (for mic/audio)

The touchscreen display was duplicated to the "Primary" external monitor and, I turned on the windows voice acessability.

 

 

Then, I re-targeted the 8 Windows "Gestures" (these are swipes on the touchscreen toward the pi/4 radii angles) to some LabVIEW menu hot-keys encluding some "Custom menu hot-keys"  like Ctrl + / repurposed to create snippet from selection (I've never really found tiling windows side by side to be much use)

 

I had also been in contact with our good buddy Norm K. and installed LV Speak with Super Quick Drop.

 

So yes, I had 3 monitors, 3 mice, and 2 keyboards + Voice for text entry.  A little practice and ....  Perhaps, my boss found the best words to describe the result when he caught me actually doing some work, "WTF Jeff! you look like that scene from Bill and Ted's Excellant Adventure where Bethoven is in the music store!"  Not too surprising since I found myself totally comfortable Left-handing  Ctrl, Shift and Alt on the external keyboard and Clicking/Dbl Clicking whichever of the three mice or keyboard was closest to the right hand at the time.Smiley LOLSmiley LOLSmiley LOL

 

That being said, "Gestures" on a Win7 Laptop touchscreen is really 8 simple keystrokes with plat mods.  A whole lot more could be done along the same lines and Win 10 tablets advertizes a lot of built in touch-screen capability.  Spin your finger CW/CCW around a valve control to open/close it by some fraction is one obvious "hot-key" custom menu Event.

 

I told you it would sound wild!


"Should be" isn't "Is" -Jay
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Smiley Very Happy I think I will not go that much extreme as you did, but some idea I also got already, like the "Spin your finger CW/CCW around a valve control to open/close it by some fraction is one obvious "hot-key" custom menu Event." 🙂 Going to be supercool on the screen 🙂

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I just got done with my first touch screen project.  Some general advice that I learned (some too late) that made my GUI look and work better. Note:  I used a resistance type touch screen, so some of these are geared toward that specifically.

 

-Resistive touch screens aren't that accurate... and your customers/operators are going to misclick lots.  Make things bigger than you expect you need to.

 

-If you don't have a keyboard/mouse attached, the built-in Windows keyboard doesn't quite cut it.  Either design your GUI in such a way that it doesn't require much (if any) typing, or have a built in popup keyboard / keypad.  They are surprisingly easy to develop.

 

-Someone already mentioned this, but... don't use the very corners of your screen.

 

-Consider setting Windows properties to increase the size of your minimize / close, as well as your scrollbars.  It'll make things easier

 

-Disable right-click menus on controls.  Many times my customer would press and hold a click which would cause the right click popup menu to open. This was especially worse while scrolling through an array or something.

 

-This is good practice in general, but if you have multiple monitors make sure new screens appear on the correct monitor. Moving screens from one monitor to another is annoying with touch.

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I'll approach this from a slightly different environment - process control in production.

 

- The comments about making things bigger are good ones, but another thing is to add dead space between buttons, i.e. big gaps

 

- I remove keyboard data entry through the use of a barcode scanner - there are only three barcodes a user must scan: one at the beginning of a session to identify themselves, one at the beginning of each works order to identify the job that they will work on, and once per product to check a part against the bill of materials. All other information I can obtain programmatically

 

- I disable touch gestures in Windows myself, as I want to limit interaction to just button presses

 

- For me, logging into a business Windows network without a keyboard was a big problem. With the Windows User Account Control setting set to 'None', you cannot use a virtual keyboard to CTRL-ALT-DEL at the login screen. Setting the UAC setting to Minimum (or whatever the next step up the ladder is) curiously allows this. Sadly, the UAC setting is reset by sysadmin scripts at my workplace. Our workaround? Setting autologin to a generic production account in the Windows registry, reducing login requirements to pressing OK on a security disclaimer screen.

 

- For the suppliers I can use, the least expensive options for touchscreen monitors happen to be 22" or 23" widescreens, made by Iiyama and Viewsonic. Connection to the PC is through USB and a generic HID driver, as mentioned elsewhere. I can provide a couple of links by private message if that would be nice

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CLA
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