Hardware support

We are often asked what devices does your driver support or can you recommend a touch monitor. More often this request is for a MacOS system that does not natively support multi-touch devices unless our driver is installed.

The simple answer is we are likely to support any touch screen device currently available to purchase, or we can very easily add support if it isn't supported. To this end you just need to select one that suits your needs, considering price, size, aesthetics etc. We do not necessarily recommend a specific touch monitor because new ones are being released all the time and our knowledge is not always current. We always recommend you purchase on a sale or return basis (if possible) just in case there are any issues supporting the device.

A more detailed explanation of device support follows...

The UPDD driver has mainly been developed to support 'touch' like devices utilised on top of the video display whereby the stylus contact and movement is applied to the 'absolute' position of the contact rather than the 'relative' position that applies to devices not directly related to the video display such as mice and trackpads.

Devices that need absolute positional support are typically touch monitors, pens used on video devices, whiteboards etc.

Regarding support for these devices the driver supports old serial devices, old legacy USB (non hid) devices and new PnP hid compatible devices.

The old 'devices' need to be manually configured in our software, of which many are, and therefore we just need to the know device in use such we can advise if it is already supported or if we need to add support. We will advise the information required to add support for old legacy devices.

Regarding current, modern, touch devices the driver configures these automatically from the HID Report Descriptor held in the device and therefore we can generally support these devices with very little configuration.

When a modern USB 'touch' device is plugged in it is recognised by its USB Vendor and Product id and the system looks to see if a driver is installed that supports the device. Therefore for our driver to support a given touch device it must register the correct USB vendor and product id for that device. We have 100's of these devices preconfigured in our production system and available for download on our download page. You can also request a driver be build for an HID touch device connected to your system using our driver build utility.

Failing that, to add support for a device we just need to configure a device with the correct USB vendor and product id.

The Vendor and product id is easily extracted from the system when a USB touch device is plugged in:

http://support.touch-base.com/Documentation/50330/Mac-OS-X

http://support.touch-base.com/Documentation/50329/Windows-desktop

http://support.touch-base.com/Documentation/50331/Linux

However, there is one important consideration for touch devices used in a Mac. Some (not many) multi-touch touch devices are able to determine they are not plugged into a Windows system and therefore switch into a single touch 'mouse' like device so that single touch will work. This is of no use if you are using our driver to support multi-touch and gestures.

To cater for this we can supply a Windows driver to run with the device in Windows and capture the HID Report Descriptor from a Windows system (that will be running in multi-touch mode). The captured MT HIDRD is then embedded in our driver for that device. When used in a Mac the device will initially run in single touch mouse mode but our driver, using details from the embedded MT HIDRD, will send requests to the device to switch into MT mode. In 99% of cases this works and the device reverts back to running as a multi-touch device.