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Fun with the Diamond's touch sensor (7/10/2008 9:39 pm)
Filed under: Windows Mobile

The HTC Touch Diamond has a silly number of sensors. It has the tilt and motion sensor that I've been digging into in my last couple of posts. And, in addition to the resistive touch sensor it has over the screen, it also has a capacitive touch sensor around the d-pad. This sensor is used by a handfull of apps to allow you to "gesture". For instance, Opera uses this to allow you zoom in and out by gesturing circles around the d-pad.

Sadly, much like the Tilt sensor, the Nav Sensor (for want of a better name) doesn't have a clearly defined SDK to allow developers to access it. Well, now it does :)

I've updated my Sensor Test sample application to include the APIs necessary to generate the Nav Sensor messages and show you how to get very basic information out of them. I make no promises, but this will probably be my last post about the Touch Diamond for a while.

Time: 7/10/2008 11:25 pm
From: Rubber
Comment:
Exelent work man! But I can't see the Nav Sensor in your new Sensor Test sample

Time: 7/11/2008 7:04 am
From: Scott
Comment:
Whoops, try downloading the zip file again, looks like I uploaded the wrong version somehow. It's fixed now.

Time: 7/12/2008 5:01 pm
From: Koush
Comment:
Nice, I was just investigating the nav sensor! I figured out how to access the light sensor. I'll be updating my SDK in a bit and will send you the relevent method signatures.

Time: 7/12/2008 5:55 pm
From: Koush
Comment:
http://www.koushikdutta.com/2008/07/htc-light-sensor-sdk.html You can look at HTCLightSensor.cs and grab the method sigs.

Time: 7/14/2008 6:10 am
From: Cem
Comment:
Hi Scott, great work. I've also tried to figure out the API and got the two unknown fields. The first one should be a gap resulting from memory-alignment. The second gives you the orientation of the phone. I've posted my findings on my new blog: http://orbster.com/blogs/CemsBlog/2008/07/14/1216033440000.html

Time: 8/20/2008 1:15 pm
From: crafty
Comment:
Hi Scott. Great work reverse engineering the sensor API. I was wondering if you had looked into the multi touch abilities of the capacative panel? HTC's NavDbgTool.exe (found here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=416334) clearly shows that the hardware supports multi touch. It would be great if we could develop an API to access these abilities.

Time: 8/20/2008 2:03 pm
From: Scott
Comment:
I haven't had a chance to look into this yet, I'll try to play with it this weekend, and see what I can dig up.

Time: 9/6/2008 6:50 am
From: KriX
Comment:
crafty: if you're still interested in the capacitive panel, I have a revisited version of Scott's SensorTest with message handling for panel click (position, keydown/up ...)