improvisation

Although they say "necessity breeds invention", I guess this doesn't really count as a true invention, because the idea is not original or novel. But I'm so dang pleased with myself that I just have to tell this story.

I've been playing around with my iPad for a while now and naturally I've tried some drawing apps to see how well they work with the iPad. To make a long story short, they're pretty neat programs and it's fun to do a little painting/drawing with your finger, but ultimately the finger painting technique lacks the kind of precision you want when doing anything other than, well, finger doodles and very rough sketches. Specifically, we've started trying to plan and sketch out what our back yard is going to look like when we are meeting with landscaping contractors and I've used the iPad a few times to show some thoughts and basic ideas. One of the cool things the app I use (a free app called DrawCast) can do, is use an existing image as a background and then you can draw on top of it (I'm sure lots of the popular drawing apps can do this). So I've taken a clean drawing of our backyard lot and imported it into the iPad, so I can use it as a background and draw sketches of our landscaping ideas over it. Sure beats using a bunch of paper to draw and redraw as we try to form our often-changing ideas about what the backyard should look like. The accuracy of my finger drawing was pretty rough though and in one of these collaborative sessions V. asked why didn't I get a stylus for the iPad? That got me thinking about it and I started shopping online for one. Turns out these things are like $15-$40!! What the frak?! They're just pieces of capacitive foam or rubber at the tip of a pen-like tube right? Well I kept reading about how great they are and how much people like them so I went ahead and ordered one through Amazon -- for $15.

Well I was hoping to get it today (Friday) just before the long weekend, so I could play with it all weekend long but to my dismay the Amazon Prime has let me down -- it's Friday evening and no stylus. So in my despair I went back online and thought, man it's such a simple design, there has to be a way to do it yourself and make one on the cheap right? Google to the rescue! I found a few links and apparently there are quite a few different ways to make one. But the one I ended up following, was incredibly simple and requires only 3 parts. A pen or stick (easy), some tape (easy), and a piece of capacitance-conducting material (erm... wha?). Turns out it was easier than I thought when the DIY instructions mentioned using the shiny anti-static packaging that internal hard drives come packed in. Every true geek (and maybe even the average experienced computer user) has some of this stuff laying around. I was at work and just looked around in my office and found some in like 2 minutes. 5 minutes later, with some scissors to cut a small quarter-inch wide by 3 inch long strip of the material, I was in business. Wrapped the shiny material around the tip, leaving a little bit of play between the material and the tip of the pen (I used a click-type pen so that the ball point was retracted for this). The idea is to let it compress or squish (yeah, highly technical term) a little when it is pressed down on the screen, so that it kind of emulates the touch profile of your finger when you touch or tap the screen. Taped it down, then wrapped the rest in a spiral up the pen, and taped down that end to the pen. Done. How does it work? Pretty dman well if I say so myself (and yeah, I think I just did). I tested it against the iPad screen to unlock, and it worked fine. Flipped through some pages to find my drawing app, perfect. Launched the DrawCast app and started writing, drawing, whatever. Worked like a charm. So much better than using a finger.  And no greasy screen smudges from my fat oily hands!  I'm so dang pleased with myself. I had to run around the office and tell some of my coworkers.

What makes it work? The touch screen is a capacitive screen, so it reads an electrical impulse from your finger. Using a plain old stick or pen won't work because they won't conduct electricity from your finger to the screen. The capacitive material at the tip of the stylus (yes, by my magical craftsmanship it has been transformed from a pen to a stylus, doesn't that sound fancy and worthy of $15?) does the trick, and by spiraling it up the length of the pen, it contacts your fingers where you hold the pen. I suppose the same thing could be accomplished if you have a pen with a metallic conductive tube, but I improvised with what I had in front of me, with all of 5 minutes effort. Like I said, magical craftsmanship.

So now I'm going to play with this over the weekend and see how it works for me. Who knows, maybe when my "real" stylus finally arrives in the mail next week, I might just return it and keep using my DIY stylus instead.