BlackBerry® PlayBook™

[lstoch]

Hi George

Thanks a mil for the detailed posting.

I forgot to mention that, in my frustration with the situation, I read up on how to make one's own stylus.  

And yes, one of the solutions was to take an AAA battery and use the negative and as a stylus - this was the first of the "home made" stylii I tried.  The result - the **bleep** thing didn't work at all.  

This may well have been because the battery wasn't strong enough (it was new and I hadn't used it for anything else) or it could have been my screen protector.

By the way, the screen protector was a real cheapie off Amazon 

LCD Screen Protector for RIM BlackBerry Playbook
Sold by: TDC Direct
Condition: new
$1.51 

[georgekGR]

thanks for the feedback on that. if youu had tried the battery not working, then sure you had different results than me, so i guess you can blame the protector somehow but this would be totally out of my league to help with. i thank you for bringing this up as i am looking for a stylus too and this is being rather a useful and helpful thread. thanks for your imput. 

___--------------------------------_____

@peter ok thanks about the not quiting my day job advice...

that said i pointed out my physics and electronics knowledge to be limited but if what you point out is the case i will not argue it, thanks for the input and points passed on  

thanks

all the best

[lstoch]

Peter

What you say makes a lot of sense.  All the other home made stylii basically connected your fingers via the shaft of the stylus to the tip and ultimately to the screen.

I am getting to the point where I think the problem is the screen protector.  As I said earlier, all the stylii I tried worked perfectly on the iPad (without screen protector) and none of them worked adequately (I had to apply a lot of pressure) on the PlayBook.

It would be great if someone with a PlayBook without screen protector could comment on the efficacy of a stylus on the naked PlayBook screen I'd rather not mess with my screen protector just in case that's not where the problem lies.  On the iPad there was no need to apply any pressure whatsoever - just the faintest touch did the trick.

[georgekGR]

the ones i tried without a protector did not work so well (they were supposedly universal)

the galaxy tab one did a better job and the bamboo one is the one ii saw going around on the net buut did not get to try, but they say it is one of the best. 

will keep on lolking and if i get any luck with a good one i will let you know. 

thanks again. 

all the best

[peter9477]

---

georgekGR wrote:

turn the same battery arround and touch the screen. if what you say is right., then why is the positive pole not working at all since all conditions you say are in play?

---

As I said, the outer walls of the battery are connected to the negative pole, not the positive one.  By touching the positive pole to the screen, you are merely providing a small area of contact with a small bit of metal.  By touching the negative pole, you provide a somewhat larger area of contact (which has some effect on how well it works) plus -- and this is the critical part -- your own body's capacitance is in very close proximity to that area because there's only a very thin layer of plastic separating your fingers from the walls of the battery.  Removing your fingers from the picture by wearing oven mitts makes it much like the positive pole case: just a small bit of metal touching, and not enough to affect it.

---

georgekGR wrote:

pd, flat penny on the screen acts like a conduct between your finger and the screen. to prove it to you, touch the penny and go arround the screen as you say it works. now touch the penny on the screen and cover the top surface with your cleaniing cloth....hmmmm....i still get to keep my day job...

---

You're saying that if you put a cleaning cloth between the coin and the screen, it stops working?  That's probably true, as the cloth separates the coin+you from the screen by a large enough distance and/or acts to block the capacitance more.  (Depends on the dielectric constant of the material, I suppose.)

Did you try it with a single sheet of paper instead?  That's much thinner, and should let things still work, even though as I think you'll admit, there is no actual conductive path formed (i.e. no circuit).

[georgekGR]

no i was saying that if you put a cloth between the penny and your finger it stops working. but this does not matter. i need to do my tech reading about the touchscreen technology and get to understand it better so thanks for that and sorry for my inaccurate info. 

anyway thank you for pointing me to the right direction and the corrections which are received with appreciation. 

best regards.

[peter9477]

@georgekGR, okay, I get it now.

The reason that makes it stop working is that it's not the penny (the metal) itself which is being sensed. The coin doesn't have very much capacitance. As with the situation with the battery, it works only when your body's relatively large capacitance is brought into play.

The conductor (metal object) is merely a means of bringing your body's influence near enough to the screen to have an effect. The finger alone can do that, the coin can do that, and the outer case of the battery (connected to the metal on the bottom, which only happens to be the negative pole when used in a circuit) does the same thing.

Inserting anything thick enough in between, or even something thin but with the right properties, is sufficient to reduce the effect to the point where the screen can no longer sense it. (That's likely not quite true... the screen could still tell you're there, if it wanted to, but they've set some threshold high enough that it just ignores you... that's required to avoid spurious touches making it seem too sensitive.)

[georgekGR]

now this might actually get us somewhere where you point out the threshold seettings, could it be that the settings on pb are somehow making the screen less sensitive compared to others, lets say ipad. , so could that be a software/setup issue? because if so would it be possible to recalibrate that through updates???

[lstoch]

Peter

Following on your last comment, RIM should provide a "screen sensitivity" parameter whereby the user can set the sensitivity of the screen.

[peter9477]

It's certainly possible for that sort of thing to be changed, but I'd say it's unlikely they will change it solely to accomodate one particular screen protector and stylus combination, when it's likely the screen protector in question is just not designed to be used with a stylus.

I don't know the stylus designs at all... possibly they are generally already at the lower end of what's acceptable, maybe like someone with a fairly small finger. (I should do some experimentation with my five-year-old to see if there's any difference in how hard she has to "squash" her finger down to have it sensed, versus what I have to do which is very little.)

If the screen protector was designed without any consideration for styluses, and styluses in general present a lower signal for the detection circuitry, then clearly he'll need to find a "louder" stylus, or a different screen protector.

If it was only $1.50 I have to say (not knowing much about that industry) that I'm not currently surprised if it doesn't work well with a stylus. (At that price I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work well even with a big fat finger!)