Touch Screens? 1

[kathyc2020]

I'm trying to write a VB program for our plant to
keep track of a small area of our inventory. The
plant manager would like to have touch screens
instead of the employee entering data into a text
field.

Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[cyberbiker]

I have some small experience with touch screens.

The actual programming was not too much different than normal.

The only programming problem that I ran into with my "LIMITED" experience was that a touch screen app cannot use the concept of focus.

My assumption is that this is due to hardware requirements.
Regardless, it takes a little getting used to from a developers point of view.


You will also need to be pretty detailed with the design of the app. Layout and control size are particulary critical.

I loved messing with the app I was familiar with since it was laid out great for a lefty.(Controls large and on the left (the proper) side) But most people found the app difficult to use since they tend to do things backwards and use their right( actually wrong) hand. Keep that in mind. it is minor at first but became a royal pain quickly.

Hardware can be very expensive for touch screens. Unless your boss has good reasons for wanting the touch screen, I would research the cost before developing the app.
If my memory is correct, the cost of a PC with a touch screen was over $4000 although I suspect that costs have come down.
Additionally, the ones I was familiar with used non standard components. I do not remember the actual cost of a hard drive, but I do remember the expressions when the accountant saw the bill for one that failed.

You will certainly want to do some shopping around for hardware.

I am certain there have been many changes since my limited exposure. Prices are surely less now than over a year ago.


Terry (cyberbiker)

 

[TheTuna]

By touch screens, do you mean actual PC Monitors with touch screens, or do you mean hand held devices that are carried around and used throughout the plant?


No Dolphins were harmed in the posting of this message... Dolphin Friendly Tuna!

 

[kathyc2020]

Touch screens as in monitors.

 

[TheTuna]

Touch screen monitors, for the most part, allow the user to interact with programs without using a mouse, and not surprisingly, almost all touchscreens are seen by the OS as a mouse. They connect via the serial port or the USB port, depending on the make/model.

I've developed applications that run without a mouse or keyboard.

Some things to note:

The touch screen simulates a single mouse click at the point where the screen is touched. You'll see the cursor move to that point on the screen.

Buttons respond as if clicked by a mouse.

If your application requires input of data without the presence of a keyboard, you'll need to implement a simulated keyboard (on screen).

You can create a VB form and add buttons to it, and you'll need that form to stay on top of all other windows.

You an use sendkeys to simulate keyboard strokes, but fucus becomes an issue.

The best solution I came up with involved hiding a text box in an invisible portion of the keyboard form... a timer kept focus on that field. Each keystroke on the touchscreen keyboard receives 1 character, then that character is sent to the form.field that 'had focus'.

in a module, create a public control variable:

Public FocusOn as Control

And wherever you need the text input to go, programatically set the variable to the name of the control:

set FocusOn = form1.text1

Your keyboard has an array of buttons. Each button's caption is the Letter of the key.

within the click event of the array, your code says:

focuson.text = command(3).caption

Whatever the caption is, be it letter a or 3 or whatever, that text goes to the field with the simulated focus.

Now, you have to provide a backspace key and a way to move from one field to another. So, for instance, if they pressed your backspace key (who's index is 23, you could pre-code that key to send the ascii code for backspace (isn't it 8, i don't recall off hand). For enter you can use chr(13) or chr(10) or both...

There's more to consider... I'll have to get back to you, but later on I can post a functional keyboard .frm file you can use.




No Dolphins were harmed in the posting of this message... Dolphin Friendly Tuna!

 

[TheTuna]

Better yet, I'll put a sample project out on one of my temp web sites... I'll post a link here when I've done it (will be late tonight)




No Dolphins were harmed in the posting of this message... Dolphin Friendly Tuna!

 

[TheTuna]

I've re-read your initial post... does your boss want a program to quickly allow the database to realize an item has been removed from the inventory?

If so, you could just set up a list of items, have the users touch an item on the list, then a button to confirm the deduction...



No Dolphins were harmed in the posting of this message... Dolphin Friendly Tuna!

 

[TheTuna]

Well Kathy, all my home computers and my laptop are currently unable to get an internet connection due to some spyware/malware removal. I should be up and running tonight, but I can't send the sample project just yet.

thanks for the star whover did that...

No Dolphins were harmed in the posting of this message... Dolphin Friendly Tuna!

 

[kathyc2020]

Thank you so much for your assistance TheTuna.

 

[TheTuna]

No problem Kathy... and call me Tuna!



No Dolphins were harmed in the posting of this message... Dolphin Friendly Tuna!

 

[cyberbiker]

Star was from cyberbiker.
Your posts answered a whole bunch of little nagging questions that I back burnered some time ago as interesting, but not enough spare time to pursue.
I added your post to my "library" for possible future use.


Terry (cyberbiker)