Thread: Multiple touchscreens on one PC?

Well, I was hoping that someone have had experiences with multiple screens, that they would have shared with me, but I think I maybe have to decrease the requirements a bit.

I have thought about skipping the stereo audio requirements, and insted find an external headphone amplifier to handle the audio.

I have searched a lot in here, not to mention on google, and I have found lots of 7" and 8" monitors, but only a few specifies if it's possible to use multiple touchscreens at one computer, so if you have any experiences with that, it would be much appreciated if you would take a minute and help me a bit, which monitors I should choose.

Thanks in advance.

What I'm looking for is to use 4 individual touch screens, to run 4 independent instances of a front end, each controlled individually by the touchscreens, but what I'm worried about is exactly what you say that several mice connected will act as one single mouse, and thereby not control each instance of the frontend individually, but instead control either one of them, or all of them, at a time.

I don't know if it has to do with limitations in Windows, or how to possibly do a workaround to prevent this, or if it's because some kind of "unique device id" is not unique for certan types of touch screen controllers.

I intend to use a quad VGA PCI express adaptor such as for instance "nVidia NVS 440" to display the individual content http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadronvs.html
My concern is how I will be able to control it by touch screens.

I have tried to install the Virtual Desktop Manager, but it just adds 4 buttons to the taskbar to switch between 4 different desktops on the same screen. The idea is quite good, and it works just like the multiple desktops in Linux, but it doesn't seem to support displaying each desktops on different video adaptors :/

I would think that using linux might be your best bet. X will allow for several different instances of a GUI to be ran on several different displays. It is passable to make the X server use a different mouse/keyboard with each instance and I would imagine that a touch screen would work as any mouse would (once drivers were installed). Having multiple touchscreens might be a problem but I would think that they should be the same model (ascetics and ease of setup). X can be easily set to start the front end on launch. I also do not know if it actually matters what brand of monitor you use, I have built several tablet PCs and my experience has been that almost all touchscreen driver boards are about the same, usually the drivers are completely interchangeable. That being said none of those were full monitors, they were just a touchscreen overlay, but I have heard similar about packaged monitor/touch combos and would not expect any difference. What might help is using different usb buses on the mainboard or using a usb hub (they typically assign objects based on the port connected not by what it is [less chance of things getting switched around] ).

Either way sounds like it will be amazing when its done.

A thing that I probably should have mentioned earlier is that I'm about half way done developing a frontend for Windows, so I guess that Linux is out of the question in this case, even though I now see the benefits of using Linux for multiple displays

Meanwhile I have found the following:
http://www.thinsoftinc.com/product_p...ng_betwin.aspx

The biggest problem is that it requires both a mouse and a keyboard connected for each station in order to work, but I have sent an enguiry to their support if there is a workaround for that, so I can connect a touch screen acting as the mouse and skip the keyboard.
Then there is only one issue left to "sort out"... I costs $99.95 (PER SEAT..!) which is pretty much compared to what the software does, but it may turn out to be the only stable solution in the long run, and then I guess I just have to pay

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I have also found the following, but I'm not sure how it works and if it suit my needs:
http://cpnmouse.sourceforge.net/

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Finally I have found this, but I don't know if I need to buy their touch panels in order to get it work with their driver:
http://www.gunzeusa.com/controllers-guides.html
http://www.hampshirecompany.com/drivers.html

I have tried to install the UniWin software, and when it prompts me to tap the screen in 4 different spots for synchronizing, the pointer disappears, but when I clicked the mouse it recognized it as a tap on the screen and moved on to the next spot, so I guess it might somehow work with all touch screens.
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If anyone have some experiences with the above drivers/software, I'd really like to hear about it, or if someone knows of similar software drivers that I should check out.

I think the time has come to gamble a bit and order 4 touch screens, and Cocide if I understant you correct, then I should be able to run several touch screens as long as I connect them to a Hub, which will always see them as different devices, no matter if they have the same internal id or whatever such devices may have as reference?

I have tried dual view with a touchscreen monitor as my secondary monitor and a nomral monitor as my primary monitor. Only problem was everytime I touched something on the touchscreen monitor, it clicked on the primary monitor!

The biggest problem is that it requires both a mouse and a keyboard connected for each station in order to work, but I have sent an enguiry to their support if there is a workaround for that, so I can connect a touch screen acting as the mouse and skip the keyboard.

I just got this reply from Thinsoft Support:

Please note that you will need to install a USB keyboard (and a USB Mouse or
USB Touch Screen) for the Station in order to run Configuration Wizard to
setup the Host and Station. After the Station is working correctly, you can
then setup the Station to Auto Logon in Windows and then unplug the Station's
USB keyboard. However, after unplugging the Station's keyboard, please note
that you should not run BeTwin Control Center --> Station Configuration, as it
will update the Station's configuration to be without a USB keyboard and the
Station will not launch (due to insufficient hardware) after you restart
Windows.

I could prevent running the config wizard, but we never know the future, and it probably will be required sometime in the future, so I guess I'll have to buy four $4.95 keyboards, get rid of the casing, build the pcb's into a small box including a 4 port USB HUB