Human Machine Interaction (HMI) and display technology vendor Densitron has addressed the continuing strong demand for tactile controls to be used in conjunction with touchscreens by launching a new evaluation kit. Incorporating three tactile rotary knobs that are already bonded, Tactila features a high-resolution 8” touchscreen as well as powerful processing that utilises ARM and Linux BSP technologies.
Although touchscreens have taken on more control requirements in many applications, there remains a natural inclination towards rotary knobs and other physical controls for core tasks – for example, adjusting LF, HF or Gain settings in broadcast audio. Designing and optimising these controls can be a time-consuming process for system vendors and their customers, which is why Densitron has created the Tactila EVK 1.0 evaluation kit.
Bazile Peter, global product manager at Densitron, explains: “This kit has been developed with the aim of addressing those applications where a touchscreen is in use but there are specific options for which the user needs to rotate a finger. Although you can recreate that in a touchscreen, it is not an especially instinctive action and, over the course of a day, can be much more tiring than it would be to use a physical object such as a rotary knob. With this EVK we are making it far easier for vendors to develop a tactile control solution but not have to go through all the ‘pain points’ of development work that would normally be necessary.”
The EVK is expected to resonate especially strongly with customers in broadcast, where it can be used to develop working control surfaces for audio mixing consoles as well as other audio and video controllers. But it also has potential for applications in the industrial and medical industry.
The initial Tactila EVK, Version 1.0, incorporates a high-performance 8” touchscreen and three tactile rotary knobs already bonded. The display is integrated with an ARM processor and an optimised Linux BSP for HMI applications is also installed. Ethernet connectivity enables easy connection to third-party hardware for evaluation of tactile controls to adjust operational and engineering parameters.
Product development teams can make use of provided demo software with three examples of typical UIs in developing their own graphical interfaces, while these can be combined with the rotary knobs via the installed Aurora software ecosystem. Aurora utilises the industry standard Qt Creator integrated development environment.
Tactila EVK Version 1.0 is available and shipping now.