LitePlacer.com forums

I've installed the Liteplacer software (28 May 2018) on a 24 inch touchscreen PC running Windows 10 (HP Compaq Elite 8300 All-in-one). It works really nicely with the touchscreen which is mounted on an arm above the Liteplacer table - much easier than using a mouse and keyboard.

Having calibrated the camera box size, it's possible to directly touch things in the camera view and move to them, which is handy for setting up tapes. However there's one glitch: the Camera Setup view is 2x zoomed compared with the Tape Setup view (I have both zoom boxes unticked in each view). This means click-to-move-there navigation works in Camera Setup but not in Tape Setup. I think this is a bug.

More generally, global navigation (moving hundreds of mm at a time) is very slow given the small camera viewport and difficult of function key navigation (especially without a keyboard).

I wonder whether it would be feasible to implement touch gestures? They would work for touchscreens as well as laptop/USB touchpads. Looking at WM_GESTURE in the Windows API doesn't look too complicated - just handle GID_PAN events. These might translate into proportional head movements - the longer the pan gesture, the further the head moves.

Going further, using other gestures would speed up some of the repetitive tasks, eg in tape setup. For example, double click could be 'set hole 1' and GID_PRESSANDTAP might mean 'next tape'.
(there are also zoom and rotate gestures, but I'm not sure what they might be used for)

I’ll look at the bug. Thank you for the information!

For the gestures: Anyone have a spare touchscreen? Seriously, a touchscreen enabled software sounds very useful. I don’t have hardware for this, but I’ll see if I can get some.

Thanks. For anyone looking into this, it's worth pointing out that there are some cheap Windows 7/8 touch PCs on the used market these days - for example, ours is a business-quality all-in-one from 2012 and was £150 on eBay UK. The main constraint is to have a 1080p display, since anything smaller (eg 1600x900) won't fit the Liteplacer window.

It took a bit of fiddling to manually install the Windows 7 touchscreen drivers on Windows 10, but once that was done it all works nicely. Next job is to fit a USB fingerprint sensor for login via Windows Hello, so we're entirely keyboard free.