Patent Application
20160202776
This application claims priority to Indian Patent Application No. 228/CHE/2015, titled “A NOVEL PASSIVE STYLUS”, filed Jan. 14, 2015, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
The present disclosure pertains to stylus' for electronic devices, and in particular, to passive stylus' with multi-faceted functionality.
A passive stylus consistent with the present disclosure includes a shaft having a first end and a second end. A first nib is present at the first end and a second nib at the second end. In various implementations, the first nib and the second nib are unique. A passive stylus consistent with the present disclosure may be suited to effect communication with a touch-input device adaptable to receive input from both ends.
A touch-input device consistent with the present disclosure may contain code, when executed, to cause the device to initialize a touch application, receive an indication of touch data, identify a tip pattern from the received touch data, and execute a set of pre-determined instructions associated with the identified tip pattern. Furthermore, the touch-input device may be associated with a host-side processing unit communicatively coupled to memory. The memory includes code to identify a tip pattern from a set of known tip patterns associated with touch data.
To facilitate understanding, identical reference numerals have been used, where possible, to designate identical elements that are common to the drawings. The drawings are not to scale and the relative dimensions of various elements in the drawings are depicted schematically and not necessarily to scale. The techniques of the present disclosure may readily be understood by considering the following detailed description in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which:
A detailed description of some embodiments is provided below along with accompanying figures. The detailed description is provided in connection with such embodiments, but is not limited to any particular example. The scope is limited only by the claims and numerous alternatives, modifications, and equivalents are encompassed. Numerous specific details are set forth in the following description in order to provide a thorough understanding. These details are provided for the purpose of example and the described techniques may be practiced according to the claims without some or all of these specific details. For the purpose of clarity, technical material that is known in the technical fields related to some embodiments have not been described in detail to avoid unnecessarily obscuring the description.
In this disclosure, a passive stylus may be defined as a capacitive stylus or digitizer pen which may be used to induce touch data on a touch-input device. Touch data may consist of a blob created when the passive stylus makes contact with a touchscreen surface of a touch-input device. A passive stylus may be used for various applications, such as but not limited to, navigation, note taking, drawing, and other precision-based applications. In the present disclosure, a passive stylus may be used to effect various commands or instantiate various operation modes of a host device (e.g., touch-input device).
Shaft component 104 includes a shaft 106 where a plurality of rods 110, 111, 112 are disposed there through. Shaft 106 has a first end and a second end. At the first end, the nibs 120, 121, 122 of rods 110, 111, 112 are exposed whereas at the second end, yet another nib 109 is disposed. As will be described in more detail below, each rod 110, 111, 112 has a unique nib shape such that various tip patterns and capacitive images may be created on a touch-input device when the multi-barrel passive stylus 100 is in operation. For example, rod 110 has a rectangular-shaped nib 120, rod 121 has a round-shaped nib 121, and rod 122 has a pointed-shaped nib 122. In yet other embodiments, some of the rods have the same nib shape to serve as backup.
Because multi-barrel passive stylus 100 has three rods 110, 111, 112, with nibs 120, 121, 122, stylus 100 can effect three unique capacitive images on a touch-input device. Advantageously, because each nib can create a unique capacitive image, the present disclosure provides a manner for a user to initiate various commands. For example, nib 120 may initiate a drawing command, nib 121 may initiate a selecting command, whereas nib 122 may initiate an erasing command. However, the present disclosure is not limited to three rods or three nibs and may be adapted to include more or less (minimum of two nibs) and this would be consistent with the spirit of the present disclosure. Furthermore, multi-barrel passive stylus 100 is not limited to rods with nibs housed within the shaft 106 and may include a nib coupled to an external region of the stylus 100 (as shown by nib 109).
To employ a particular nib, multi-barrel passive stylus 100 may include mechanical push-down sliders 105, 107, 108 coupled to an opposite end of the rods 110, 111, 112. In some implementations, the mechanical push-down sliders 105, 107, 108 may expose the rods, one at a time, beyond the second end of the shaft 106 to make contact and form a distinctive capacitive image on a touch-input device.
A passive stylus 100 may also incorporate a spring component (not shown) such that the mechanical push-down sliders 105, 107, 108 are spring loaded. A passive stylus described herein may also have other mechanical components known in the art.
Most notably, a passive stylus described within this disclosure is electronic-circuitry free which reduces the size requirements of the stylus device and its cost to manufacture. Accordingly, a passive stylus device disclosed herein is not dependent on power requirements—battery and charging circuitry and is therefore always available. Furthermore, a passive stylus device consistent with the present disclosure is not dependent on electromagnetic frequency bandwidths and hence can support many touch-input/sensitive devices.
In the embodiment shown in the figure, first nib 201 has a greater contact area than the contact area of nib 202. Accordingly, a user can use both ends of dual-nibbed passive stylus 200 to effect at least two commands or modes. Specifically, first nib 201 has a rectangular or square shape. However, second nib 202 may have a pointed shape. Further, dual-nibbed passive stylus 200 may include a lever 204 to expose or conceal the second nib 202.
Because first nib 201 and second nib 202 have unique shapes, nibs 201, 202 will form unique tip patterns and capacitive images. An exemplary illustration of a capacitive image 203 attributable to second nib 202 is further shown in the figure.
Raw touch data may be received at baseline estimation block 701 where the data is further processed as illustrated by baseline relaxation and removal block 702, noise reduction block 703, segmentation block 704, blob feature calculation block 705, position calculation block 706, tracking block 707, object classification block 708, jitter removal block 709, gesture decoding (optional) block 710, and output wrapper block 711. After the touch data is processed within the touch processing pipeline 700, touch points are reported to an operating system. In some embodiments, the touch points are reported to the operating system in the form of a message which includes an identified tip pattern (or description thereof) and a command to execute a set of pre-determined instructions associated with the identified tip pattern.
Most notably, the present disclosure improves upon prior art touch processing pipeline by enhancing the functionality of object classification block 708. In the present disclosure, objection classification block 708 determines the tip pattern of the received raw touch data and in some embodiments, the determining includes measuring a feature set of the tip pattern such as, but not limited to, a maximum pixel value, measuring a blob area of the tip pattern, and measuring a maximum slope of the blob. Moreover, the detected tip pattern may be accentuated using temporal signals to further add to the robustness of the tip-pattern detection technique described herein. It should be appreciated by one having ordinary skill in the art that the aforementioned feature sets are more a function of the passive stylus' nib rather than the manner of which the stylus is held or maneuvered by a user.
A touch-input device consistent with the present disclosure may be associated with a host-side processing unit communicatively coupled to memory. In other embodiments, the touch-input device may be associated with standalone touch device and therefore may include a processing unit therein. In some embodiments, the memory includes code to identify a tip pattern from a set of known tip patterns associated with touch data. In some implementations, the processing unit includes a central processing unit whereas in other implementations, the processing unit includes a graphics processing unit. The memory component of the touch-input device includes code to execute a set of pre-determined instructions associated with the identified tip pattern. However, the present disclosure is not limited thereto. Further, a touch-input device consistent with the present disclosure includes a touch ASIC and/or integrated sensor hub that is operable to receive an indication of the touch data. Moreover, because the passive devices disclosed herein are electronic-circuitry free, a hardware sensor (e.g., EMR sheet) is not required on the touch-input device thereby conserving cost, power, and space.
In the embodiment shown in the figure, computer architecture 800 includes Intel's® Integrated Touch technology but the he present disclosure is not limited thereto. As such, computer architecture 800 includes an Intel® kernel which helps process the touch data as will be described below.
As shown in the figure, a passive stylus 802 having a round tip 803 can create a capacitive image 804 on a touch sensor 801 of a touch-input device. Additionally, analog circuitry may be coupled to a touch array of a touch-input device to directly provide touch data to Platform Controller Hub (PCH) 807. In the embodiment shown, touch sensor 801 may be coupled to PCH 807 via a serial peripheral interface (SPI). However, the present disclosure is adaptable such that touch sensor 801 may be coupled to PCH 807 by other interconnects such as, but not limited to, an embedded display port (eDP).
Although the present disclosure has been described herein as using a capacitive touch array to obtain touch input, the present disclosure is further adaptable to implement other touch input devices using different technologies such as light emitting cameras or other image-based touch or gesture capture techniques.
Moreover, other controllers such as a manageability engine (ME) or converged security engine (CSE). Such controllers execute firmware and have direct control over SPI 808 interface ports and associated direct memory access (DMA) 809 operations. In some embodiments, a dedicated microcontroller manages SPI 808 interface port and the associated DMA 809 or a dedicated state machine may be provided to control the SPI 808 interface port and DMA 809 operations (without use of a microcontroller).
Furthermore, the computer architecture 800 includes code to execute a touch algorithm 805 by execution units 806. In some embodiments, touch algorithm 805 includes code to initialize a touch application, receive an indication of touch data, identify a tip pattern from the received data, and execute a set of pre-determined instructions associated with the identified pattern. Touch algorithm 805 may further include code to identify a tip pattern by clustering raw touch data into a blob, employing pattern matching, and mapping the blob to one of a set of known blobs. Further, touch algorithm 805 may include code to measure a maximum pixel value of the touch data, measure the area of the blob, and measure a maximum slope of the blob.
In some implementations, the known tip patterns are characterized in relation to attributes of a particular feature set. More specifically, each know tip pattern may have a specific value (or range) for each attribute (e.g., maximum pixel value, blog area, maximum blob slope). As such, the attributes associated with the received touch data may be compared to that of known tip patterns thereby employing pattern matching to map the blob to one of a set of known blobs.
Touch algorithm 805 may also include code to send a message which includes the identified tip pattern to an operating system to execute the set of pre-determined instructions. In some embodiments, touch algorithm 805 implements blocks 703-710 of touch processing pipeline 700 from
In addition, computer architecture 900 may employ touch firmware (FW) 903 to implement a touch algorithm as described herein. Once the touch data is processed, commands and data may be sent to System-On-Chip (SoC) 904 and driver block 905. After the touch data is processed, a message is sent to the operating system to execute a set of pre-determined instructions associated with a detected tip pattern.
For example, in the embodiment where an Intel® kernel is employed, the kernel receives touch output of processed touch data from a vendor kernel 1002. The processed touch data received from the vendor kernel 1002 may include a summary and other attributes of the processed raw touch data. In the event that a certain attribute is associated with the touch data, the vendor kernel 1002 sends a message to the operating system to take a specific action (e.g., display some prompt on the display, etc.). It should be understood however that both pre-processing and post processing are optional and that the present disclosure is not limited thereto.
The present disclosure provides a description of a novel, multi-faceted passive stylus. It will be understood by those having ordinary skill in the art that the present disclosure may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from the spirit and scope of the disclosure disclosed. In addition, the examples and embodiments described herein are in all respects illustrative and not restrictive. Those skilled in the art of the present disclosure will recognize that other embodiments using the concepts described herein are also possible.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 228/CHE/2015 | Jan 2015 | IN | national |
