Weylus – Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Weylus – Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on Linux

github.com

171 pointsxept26 comments

Previous discussion:

Show HN: Weylus – Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23443430 - June 2020 (42 comments)

My smartphone has a camera on its back. It is probably not convenient, but can it be used to detect motion so that my phone could be used as a mouse?

KDE Connect can be used to move your mouse, too.

By dragging it around as an optical mouse?

More like a touch pad on the screen

> No apps except a modern browser (Firefox 80+, iOS/iPadOS 13+) are required on your tablet.

Huh, so that means it should work on anything with a touch screen and a modern browser, no? For example, a Steam Deck would work too?

Seems like it but the Steam Deck touch screen is horrendously bad though, so that wouldn't be very useful.

Any browser that supports "PointerEvents" I think will do it (canIuse indicates its all of the them..). There is a How it works section at the bottom, which is interesting:

"Modern browsers expose so called PointerEvents that can convey not only mouse but additionally stylus/pen and touch information. Weylus sets up a webserver with the corresponding javascript code to capture these events. The events are sent back to the server using websockets.".......

https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus#how-does-this-work

Great.... Just what I was searching a long time ago to give a new life to my old Tablet PC

Look like the latency isn't great from the Gif.

First thing I noticed. Modern Pro tablets advertise latency in the 20ms range, this looks like a few hundred ms.

Creator here: The last time I did measurements for the latency of mirroring the screen I got about 60ms (over WIFI). The Gif is from way back before I did any optimizations at all.

Thanks for the reply! Good to hear, thanks!

Thanks for commenting.

Respectful suggestion that you have no obligation to follow up on, but it might be a good idea to replace that gif with a more recent capture, or even to just remove it? I ran into your project a while ago, before it got featured on here, and that specific gif is the sole reason I never looked into it any further; my immediate reaction was just, "oh, never mind, it looks like the latency is too high to be useful."

Seeing your comment here is actually a happy surprise since I remember thinking at the time that it would be a really cool project if only the latency was even just a bit better :)

60ms is still probably too high for most drawing (of course to be fair, WIFI I'm sure is a big part of that), but it's usable enough that I don't think I would have dismissed the project outright if I had known that the gif wasn't representative.

Either way though, cool project, and I appreciate the clarification.

This might be why, it's using TCP instead of UDP?

    sudo ufw allow 1701/tcp
    sudo ufw allow 9001/tcp

https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus#running

I’m guessing because it’s wireless instead of plugged in. I bet a wired USB TCP connection would be much faster.

Also, if you notice, the laptop response is much faster. To me, this suggests that the drawing on the tablet might require a round trip back to the server. If so, it could probably be sped up by drawing locally/async.

I wish I had discovered this before getting rid of my old android 4.4 tablet.

does this support using old android tablets?

"No apps except a modern browser (Firefox 80+, iOS/iPadOS 13+) are required on your tablet"

So no. My old samsung galaxy note 10.1 would be perfect for this, too, but I cannot upgrade its browser anymore since years ..

What about installing fennec from f-droid? Doesn't work?

Hm, I could give it a try again, but I think it did not work last time I tried (some years ago).

"This version requires Android 5.0 or newer."

- https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

Just install a custom rom from some random XDA post, it will be just as secure as running an ancient OS

Not all devices have an unlockable bootloader, unfortunately. Lots of unnecessary e-waste due to this. Amazon's tablets are one of the worst offenders.

Can i take a guess?

HP Touchpad?

A toshiba one whose bootloder was never unlocked.

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