Hi everybody, I'm back from about a year off PD, I know it sounds terrible and it was...I'm hoping to get involved in the forum since I feel a little bit more confident and I'll still need lots of help.

I'm posting because I need to share something with people that will understand. I just discovered the Grid object (many thanks to the programmers) and I have been sitting on my computer like a kitten with a ball of yarn for the last ten minutes - because I have a 15 inch touch screen.

If anyone is interested in getting a touch screen I recommend it, though now I have to go through all my old patches to make buttons larger.

I spent a total of $115 on an Elo 1545L touchscreen and have it running *fairly* accurately on Ubuntu Studio. It's inaccurate at the edges of the screen.

While the Elo drivers should work for Windows (not XP x64 though...) (and Mac?) I could not compile them under Linux (probably because it's AMD64?...I may have been missing some dependencies, this is one of the first things I did with Linux)

so I used a program called xinput_calibrator by Tias (and co) that did a good job. The program will apply the calibrations and then output a line that you insert into your .xinitrc file. Only problem here is that I had to change Grub to "text" startup so that I get a plain login, type "startx", and it reads the script, bypassing GDM. You can make GDM read the script but I'm a Linux noob and can't be bothered.

Anyway, Grid + touchscreen = huge kaoss pad (TM) for a fraction of the price. Or drum pad, I'm finding that it is responsive enough to play sixteenth notes at a moderate tempo.

If you have any questions about touchscreens there's a 50% chance that I'll give you worthwhile information and a 100% chance I'll tell you to get Elo (because they are cheap and I haven't used any others.)

Funny thing about Elo is that the touch system works out of the box, but it inverts X and Y. A couple cleverly placed mirrors might do the trick.

Don't get one if you are dead set on using XP x64. Elo has very good docs even for discontinued items.

Happy parametering!

• J.P.