Acer Aspire One Easy & Fun Solderless Touch Screen KIT

As much as I hate to fail, you are most probably right.... xp is looking the right way to go.............. Any advice or step by step guidance to do as you did?

36 years old and feeling like an 6yr old!!!

 

After fidgeting around unsuccesfully with USB sticks, I bought a separate DVD station to load XP on the AAO. Spending the EUR 55,- earlier would have saved me 4 days. With N-lite, I made a slipstreamed XP SP3 with as many thing as possible removed. Alas, it would not install. So I installed XP and SP3 directly on the AAO. Then I did some stripping. Then I studied the guidelines on how to speed up the SSD. You'll find many references to that on this board, the EEE board and elsewhere. The trick is to ensure all temp and cache directories are on a ramdisk so you minimize read and write actions to the SSD. And there are some other things to do in Firefox 3 and in the registry. This morning I opened the door in the bottom of the AAO and plugged in a mini bluetooth USB adapter. With the extra cable and USB ports left on the touchscreen controller board the bluetooth mod took 5 minutes.

To communicate while on the road, I bought Joikuspot to connect my Nokia N87 via wifi to the AAO. With linpus, there was no other way because Nokia makes no drivers for AAO linpus, obviously. Joikuspot was a good and elegant solution for that and well worth the EUR15. Loading the driver in Linpus of course involved running a script in a terminal window, just like we did back in 1987 on our DOS machines. (note the slight sarcasm towards linux/linpus). But after that, Joikuspot worked fine.

Now that I have XP and bluetooth, I can use the bluetooth modem in the Nokia with the standard software. And it seems that bluetooth doesn't use as much power from the Nokia N78 phone as the wifi connection to GPRS/HSDPA that Joikuspot creates, even with the wifi on the lowest transmit power.

I now have an AAO that's faster than my huge Toshiba A200. Doing the hardware mods (1Gb ram, touchscreen and bluetooth) was fun and well worth the time and money.

And with XP, I can exchange all my files seamlessly between the AAO and the tosh without funky linux command line scripts. Also, Open Office that one needs with Linpus is not as compatible with MS Office as OO claim; you'll find out the hard way when you convert a 50 page report with table of contents and index. And OO lacks the database/table with crosstabs I use all the time in Excel. Not to mention the medieval email and contacts programs that came with Linpus. I'm really glad to have my Outlook back, which I can easily sync with the Nokia phone.

XP takes a bit longer to load up, but getting the wifi connection up goes much faster than on Linpus.

Just my two cents, but linpus is for mavericks that hate Bill Gates or have nothing else to do on a day than heat up their soldering irons to copy a few files.

I know I don't make friends with these comments, but for a person that has to be productive to earn money, it's not wise to enter the experiment of Linpus if you aren't thoroughly familiar with linux already.

All in all, I don't regret to have gone 'back' to XP. I advise non linux-knowers to spend the extra EUR 50 for the XP version of the AAO. It's well worth it. I've spent multitudes of EUR 50 fidgeting with Linpus and after that converting to XP.

 

Ok guys I'm at my wits end...Im almost sure ive got a bad controller i just wana run my story past ya'll before i try to tackle the trials and tributes of trying to exchange something across sea's. Ill start from the begining

Im running an aao 160/1534 on xp...I ordered the soiderless kit from fidohub.com w/ the bt option. I installed it the first time off the camara usb as specified. before completely sealing up the aao i fired it up to test everything. On the first test i got nothing. I opened it again checked all connections and all was right. I fired it again and started looking for the hub in the device manager as i didnt recall seeing any new hardware windows poping up. this is when i noticed my camara was missing as well...

i dug into it again to inspect the cam harness and this is when it got alot worse. as i was taking the screen off for the third time i cracked the corner of the touchscreen further complicating this process.anyways, as i inspected the harness closer i noticed that i did infact cross a pin in the connecter to the camara and im assuming fry'n that whole socket. But in my defence i did have to disconnect and reconnect it in the process of trying to figure out my complications.. and the next time i plugged it in was the time i had a issue getting it back in, so i do feel something was a miss before this all took place. So I sucked it up, i fryed my cam, oes wellz ill get over it...

I than took a usp connecter and plugged the board into my pc externally to run some tests...first time i fired it up it recognized new hardware and i decided everything seemed suitable to reinstall based on my external usb test. I knew i had to go the soider route this time around as i had no direct connect anymore so i used the extra usb pin outs under the harddrive. flawless soiser job i might add ...so i install everything again this time rinning my bluetooth and candore usb gps device as well. fired up the pc and it started recognizeing my new found toys...touch screen, gps, bluetooth, hub...so on. excited to play with the toochscreen i install the drivers and restart the pc. Nothing., id been at it for 6 hours and still once again problems.

I had previously soidered a um-175 usb 3g modem in the 3g slot so my space was tight in there no doubt. I begin doing even more test. restarted with keyboard and cover on and suddonly it works.. Im like of we have a heat issue what shall we do...i fiddle with the screen for 20 minutes (working flawlessly i might add) before turning off to retest a diffrent arrangement. fire it up with just the case cover on and no keyboard and nothing..turn off take cover off again and still nothing...this is when i notice the light on the hub was on my usb stuff was working and the light for the touchscreen lite up everytime i touched the screen...the board was obviously powed and working.

i restarted again and reinstalled the drivers. again the touchscreen works but my mouse was jumping all over the screen clicking stuff looked like a ghost was on my pc if it didnt look like a 5yr old pushing buttons i would have assumed it was a haxxor. at this point im thinking maybe its the gps device messing with it...restart with gps removed and the mouse jumping was gone...but so was the controller yet again. half convinced it was heat issues i started to cut at my case and covers to better fit the chip board and the th 3g card (yes i hacked my case big deal)

so after many many many hours of frustrastion and checking and rechecking connections i know for a fact to be intacked and working properly. btw evrything else works flawlessly all the time so it wasnt a soider error or an install error. i finally come to terms with the fact that the controller was faulty weather or not this was my fault or not im not to sure and that is one of the reason i bring my story to you guys to give me your opinion and also maybe a lil help getting my cam port working again.

i was able to straiten the pin and it isnt broke. I did remove my cam and use the niffty lil connectors included with this set up to test my cam externally on another pc and on my both didnt regognice it. Is the cam fryed is the socket gone as well can it be fixxed? Do you guys think i should try to make a claim with fidohub on a bad controller cause i have read a few storys where bad controllers were the culprit. Im even willing to split the cost on just exchanging the whole kit. Since i felt slightly responsible for user error and i wouldnt mind getting an uncracked screen, even tho the crack had no real affect on the screen control. Thoughts, opinions...help, flame me for chopping up the case anything feel free to comment...lol

Sorry for the book

 

Pete, what can I say..... you have too many mods installed at the same time, and some of them weren't done as tidy as they could with bent pins and stuff. The best thing to do is to take back the machine to it's original state and get it working again. Then add each mod again one by one and get them working flawlessly before you instal the next mod. I know from fact that GPS USB devices mess up mouse drivers, and there could be more interferences from drivers affecting each other, not to mention hardware problems arisen from the bent pin in the connector.

What I do is before I do a significant HW or SW mod is make an SSD disk image on an 8Gb USB stick. In case I mess up, I have the exact same previous setup back in half an hour.

I wish you all the luck in getting your little machine working again. And be careful inside the AAO, it's all very flimsy and not made to be dismantled time and again.

 

michel,

Thanks for the speedy reply I do appricate the feedback... when it comes to the GPS i have uninstalled it and havent reinstalled it since. I decided early on i might have been tring to tackle to many mods at once. Same problem presist. I also unplugged the 3g card during certain tests as well. This device is located on an external usb that i removed and soidered a mini usb plug on to so it is on a seprate usb and working flawlessly. the bluetooth is the only thing ive left on the hub(also included in the bundle) and i did buy this as a bundle from fiddo so i do expect it to work flawlessly in conjuction with this mod. I also removed the bluetooth and tested in numourous ways...trust me i went above and beyond before coming to terms that i could have a bad board. But i did scale back the mods to simplify the problems...we are talking about 3 days and probbly 30 hours of tinkering back and forth trying to make it work and all it did was random stuff. never acted the same way twice and i was able to use the touchscreen a number of times but never did it work right the second time around. The usb hub and touchscreen controller are one unit but the usb hub never acted up always had power and my bt always worked right..i never did get signal from the GPS but i gave way to that early on as the TS was the most important thing to me at the time. For the record my AAO is working flawlessly with TS, BT and 3g card all installed no errors no drama no nothing...just the touchscreen is non reponsive and or causing drama when i try to use it. Ive been using it everynight for work in between tear downs. My teardown and reassembly count is near 50...lmao seriously

 

So that numbers down the problems to mainly the touchscreen controller. It could be a bad board, but since it worked once, that does not seem likely. I understand that the inside of your AAO is quite full with mods. Is it possible that there may be contact between the bottom of one or more PCB's and other components? My fidodido kit contained a piece of rubber mat to stick under the touchscreen controller board to prevent unwanted contact. The mini usb adapter I stashed in my AAO I wrapped in tape to prevent the metal usb outside to come in to contact with anything else. The inside of the AAO case is sprayed with metallic paint that may conduct. Perhaps the bottom of the touchscreen board is in contact with the metallic paint. They use this paint to create a cage of Faraday, I believe, to keep in or out RF disturbances.

Did you check the hinges? I found that it was faily easy to pinch one of the touchscreen wires in the hinge; It took me quite a while and tweezers and tape to get the wires right through the hinges. I'm not a pc expert, but erratic behaviour always leads me to think of a HW problem, less likely a SW problem.

Good luck again.
Michel

 

maybe i missed something in my description of my problems...The controller did work once in fact it still works...it randomly decides to work on and off, ive tried a million diffrent variations of it..i.e all wires out all wires in controller in controller out of pc...im fairly positive that it is something greater. iput the insulater on from the very begining and was very aware of the possibility of crossing the circuits. the controller is currently mounted underneath my 3g card if u take off 3g card slot cover the face of the board is showing all connections...keep in mind i have gotten the touchscreen to work many times like this and the controller board lights up everytime i touch the screen, as if the controller is regognizing the screen but no relaying the information. If these mods werennt all plug and play usb hw id be conserned with the amount of mods, but they are plug and play and i wouldnt expect these kind of issues from items that otherwise all work with exception to the touchscreen.

I know your tring to help, and i appologize for the quick snaps back to ensure each thing you mentioned was addressed. My main concern is possible driver error, but since no one else has had any simaler issues with aao's on xp wityh these simaler mods i am left with the one known issue...controller board...again thanks for the feedback.

 

pete,

I had a problem the other day with my touch screen. I have taken my aspire apart way to many times lets just say that first. anyway suddenly my mouse was flying around everywhere. checked everything, turned out to be one of the wires going to the touchscreen. it was bent in the hinge area to sharply and broke inside. it was only working when flexed the right way. it was weird because if I reinstalled the software it would work for a few minutes and then go crazy again, it made for a hard diagnostic.

the solution was, thankfully there was extra slack in the wire, so I cut all 4 wires above the broken area and soldered them back to the controller. all good. I dont know why those wires area heat shrinked like the others but maybe it was about room in the hinge

 

ill definitly look deeper into my wires as that sounds like simaler activity. Only thing that concerns me is ive tried it in so many configuarations and many involved the wires being fully exposed with nothing even touching them. Im just so frustrated with tring to figure it out at this point. But man im dieng to have touchscreen action.


We shall see, Thanks

 

Thats what I did. I tried it with them exposed and not touching anything, it doesn't help. its the wire itself inside not what it touchs.

it may not be the same for you just an idea. works great for me now

 

hrmm...intresting, Now did your controller board light up when u touched the screen? And what wires are u talking about the ones that go directly into the board or the ribbon or before the connector to the ribbon...cause honestly ive taken an iron to my mo board already, doing it to the controller board dosnt scare me in the least. :lol:

 

the wires going directly to the board

 

I want to buy one of these. Have all the problems been ironed out and are they easy to fit. Ive read too many tales of cracks etc but really want to do a touchscreen mod. just need to be sure that it will work as advertised.

 

Has anyone successfully got the touchscreen kit working with Ubuntu?

 

I have received my touchscreen today. :mrgreen:

 

I finally did (with 8.10), but I'm not sure of the complete steps.

I followed the driver install instructions initially; all of the steps.

The last step I needed to do was to add a ServerLayout section in xorg.conf:

Code:

Section "ServerLayout"
     Identifier "Default Layout"
     Screen "Default Screen"
     InputDevice "EETI" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

This part enabled it to work finally.

However, before making the xorg.conf additions, I also complied the tkusb.ko kernel module manually, following the instructions in the driver package, although I had to hack things a bit to get the compile to work (trickery with downloading Ubuntu kernel source through apt, making some symlinks, and hacking some .h files to point some of the #includes to point to the proper places). I'm not sure if this step is needed, but I think (memory is hazy right now) that after I had done this step, I was able to use the touchscreen as one massive button (i.e. touching the screen would cause a mouse click wherever the pointer was located).

In any event, it wasn't until I made the xorg.conf changes that the Touchkit utility would work properly and I could finally calibrate the damn thing.

It would be nice if someone could install the driver in 8.10 and then make the xorg.conf changes and see if that is all that is needed and if the manual kernel module compile step can be skipped. Because of all the grief I went through in trying to get it to work, I'm hesitant to do any more experimenting and am content to just enjoy the fact that it works well.

However, I have noticed that after hibernation, I lose the ability to click with the touchscreen (touching moves the pointer, but doesn't register a click). Am not sure how to deal with that. I'm using uswsusp (userspace software suspend) for hibernate functionality.

 

Hi, I'm new here..

After reading all the posts about the solderless kit i decided to order one.
Bought it on ebay from fidohub http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120335877050.
It took him about 4 days to get it from hongkong to belgium.
Everything was very nicely packed in a box, as seen on the ebay-page.

I installed the screen immediatly and after about 1 hour everything was installed and working fine.

The touchscreen has a little blur-effect on the screen, and its a big difference from the standard glossy screen.
But i kinda like the blur cause now there's no more mirror-effect when looking at the screen.

I also put in a USB Bluetooth dongle while the case was open.

One thing i remarked is that the little plastic things from the bezel, that make it click on the screen case are very fragile..
i broke one off (bottom right), and now my case has a little bulge where the thing broke off.

But after all my one still looks nice

I also ordered a 7200mah 9 cell batterie. I hope it gets delivered soon.

 

Hi,

today i have installed my touchscreen... ok. i tried it. After every step i tested it, for a full function. But... after i build my LCD case to the AAO, my touchscreen hasn´t worked anymore. I tried to remove the USB HUB from the device manager, but no response from the touchscreen. I installed the drives serveral time... no response.
Ok, i had some problems to put the touchscreen connector inside my case. It is now inside. But the touchscreen doesn´t work anymore. Any ideas ?

Edit: The Touchkit software means, that no touchscreen controller is installed. Is it a driver problem ?

I miss this :

USB Touchscreen Controller (universal).

I tried to connect the flat-cable to the connector with both sides... no response. I can´t see the touchscreen under my mouse devices etc. :-(

Edit 2: I unplugged the hole system and connected over usb my controller with touchscreen... it works... damnit...

I will try it again with my aao... :roll:
Edit3: Ok... now i´m sad... I pluged all the cables togehter... no success...

Could it possible, that the usb cable is damanged ? But, i can see some USB Hubs ... this is very crazy... :-(

 

Hi there,

Under "mice and.." i have 'USB-HID" and not 'USB Touchscreen controller(universal) ' ... Did you install the right drivers from the CD ?

If the TS works (i guess via the controler) on an external USB port.. are you sure you didn't pinch a cable in the hinges ?
Also check if you didn't bend some pins on the controler while pusshing in the little USB connectors ...

Good Luck !

 

Hi,
my AAO with touchscreen is now working corretly. My problem wasm I have bruised a cable. After fixing it, the hole system was working. :lol:

Now I am happy and am going to take care of the software. :mrgreen: