OpenCPN on Touch Screens

[bdbcat]

A special request:


We would like to hear from any OCPN users with touch screen interfaces, linux or Windows. Android excluded, please.
We are interested in your experiences with OCPN on touch screen devices.
1. General compatibility.
2. Any usability issues encountered in daily operation.
3. Operation with latest Beta (5.5.1015)

4. Other comments re/touch screens.


Thanks
Dave and the Team

[bcn]

SurfaceGo 2, Win10, used as tablet (touch only, kbd and mouse detached)



Panning and zoom as expected, on the desk at home the relatively small items can be toggled. Route manager with the new options does work.

Long press for right-click ok.


Anything else in special you would like to see tested?


Hubert

[mgrouch]

Copy/paste is not too user friendly on form input fields on raspberry pi. I guess it will be better with gtk3.
There is no call out to copy and paste and using on screen keyboard is much less convenient for that.

[Baikal]

Panning, moving around the chart, switching buttons on the toolbar - it works and it is convenient.
Partially functional on the touch screen to mark a point and edit its properties.

The context menu (font) should be larger, the line spacing is wider.

Route planning, measurement is not convenient and not practical because cannot work at the same time when panning and viewing a chartmap. The last point created is not centered on the screen - which is very important. You have to do a lot of inconsistent commands to, for example, delete a created point by mistake.
See how this function works in comparison with popular touch chartplotters https://youtu.be/Hey8I-oBLFA

[Ptizef]

Surface go 2 , W10 , same result as Hubert. Every actions ( drag, zoom, right click emulation works . ( as good as O on my android tablet )
On Linux, I tried two years ago on a laptop 10'. Linux was installed in parallel to W10
In touch mode, ( w/o panel and mouse ), O worked correctly with W10, but Linux never worked correctly. I could only drag, but right click and zoom emulation never worked
I didn't try the current beta as I don't use this laptop any more.
Regards
JP

[mgrouch]

Originally Posted by Ptizef

Surface go 2 , W10 , same result as Hubert. Every actions ( drag, zoom, right click emulation works . ( as good as O on my android tablet )
On Linux, I tried two years ago on a laptop 10'. Linux was installed in parallel to W10
In touch mode, ( w/o panel and mouse ), O worked correctly with W10, but Linux never worked correctly. I could only drag, but right click and zoom emulation never worked
I didn't try the current beta as I don't use this laptop any more.
Regards
JP

Works now on raspberry pi Linux

BBN Open Source Marine Linux OS for Raspberry Pi by Bareboat Necessities

is customized for best touchscreen support (due to need to support cockpit touchscreen chartplotter)

On screen keyboard, Two finger zoom, Long touch, Double finger tap, Three finger scroll

No finger rotate, Copy/paste is via on-screen keyboard

It’s basically raspberry pi OS, with 64-bit kernel, armhf user space. Budgie desktop, openbox window manager. And many customizations.

You can customize OS image yourself if you are willing to build it on CircleCi. The scripts are easy to understand if you know shell scripting.

Or you can just burn SD card with OS image and follow Getting Started Guide.

https://bareboat-necessities.github....reboat-os.html

—MG

[bdbcat]

MG...
Since this thread is intended to discover user experiences with OCPN on touch screens....
Perhaps you could tell us more about the OCPN changes, the Desktop environment, and the evdev drivers needed, etc. for your BBN fork.

Would appreciate it.
Thanks
Dave

[mgrouch]

It’s not a fork of OpenCPN. OpenCPN is not changed except it’s delivered with different default configuration and all plugins. Desktop environment is budgie. (See my previous post)
for touch support in OpenCPN it uses both evdev-rce and twofing with preinstalled udev rules.
There is launcher application written specifically for BBN OS.
On screen keyboard is onboard. All these are coming preconfigured for better user experience.
window manager is openbox with changed configuration (again to improve user experience on touchscreens).

You can see all the code here:

https://github.com/bareboat-necessities/lysmarine_gen

And Getting Started guide and hardware support
here:

https://bareboat-necessities.github....reboat-os.html

I did have to make changes to evdev-rce to make it work. So evdev-rce on the image is BBN fork of it. (It’s packaged as Debian package)

Although this OS is for raspberry pi
the same approach would work on Intel Linux variants. I know people were struggling for years on Linux to get touch work in OpenCPN.