Universal Stylus Initiative launches to create a specification for an active stylus

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The USI is working to develop and promote an industry specification for a cross-system active stylus.

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Prominent OEMs, stylus and touch controller manufacturers have announced the launch of Universal Stylus Initiative (USI), a new organization formed to develop and promote an industry specification for an active stylus.

Atmel is joined by a number of founding members including Intel, Lenovo, Sharp, Synaptics, Dell, among several other major names in the industry. USI technology looks to enable interoperable communication between an active stylus and touch-enabled devices, such as smartphones, tablets and computing and entertainment platforms from numerous manufacturers, allowing consumers to seamlessly write or draw on different devices with one high-quality stylus that delivers a realistic pen-on-paper experience. The group expects to publish the initial version of the USI specification in the third quarter of 2015.

“This will be a game changer,” Patrick Hanley, Atmel Product Marketing Manager, tweeted.

This specification will make it possible for manufacturers to design products to a single standard, rather than the variety of proprietary approaches now in use, and it will be compatible with current notebook computer operating system requirements. USI seeks to provide a consistent user experience while increasing the availability and consumer appeal of the active stylus, through providing industry-wide interoperability and adding functions and features not supported by current styluses.

“As a leading provider of touch solutions, we identified a need to develop a standardized specification for an active stylus across multiple platforms,” added Stan Swearingen, Atmel SVP, CTO and GM of Touch Business Unit. “As a founding member of Universal Stylus Initiative, we partnered with 11 other companies to define and drive a ubiquitous standard across platforms with capacitive touchscreens. We are excited to launch this new initiative and standardized specification, and believe it will drive more active styluses into the market, creating an evolution of touchscreen devices into content creation devices.”

Features of the USI specification include the method by which the stylus communicates with content creation devices and provides additional information such as stylus pressure levels, button presses, erasing, and other features. Through the same sensor that one’s finger uses to command a device, the stylus communicates via different frequencies to perform the action of writing — writing with up to 2048 different levels of pressure to give the pen-on-paper experience and render thinner or thicker lines in note-taking, painting and doodling, just like an ink pen.

“The market has sorely been needing a universal communication standard for active stylus,” explained Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. “To date the market has been limited by proprietary touch controller-stylus solutions, which limits OEM choices and cost reductions. With the USI specification released, we expect that the capacitive active stylus market will grow from 100 million units in 2015 to 300 million units in 2018, opening up new markets such as smartphones and all-in-one PCs.”

Want to learn more? Head over to USI’s official website here.

The ATtiny1634 Nixie clock

A Nixie tube can best be described as an electronic device that displays numerals and other information using glow discharge. The glass tube is packed with a wire-mesh anode and multiple cathodes, shaped like numerals or other symbols.

Recently, a Reddit user by the name of “Smallscaleresearch” created a slick Nixie clock powered by Atmel’s ATTiny1634.

“I was digging around in my parts bins and came across most of the exotic bits required to build a GPS sync’d Nixie tube clock. Logic side is an ATTiny1634 with a surplus (old) SiRF GPS module. HV side is based on a surplus backlight inverter, rectified and filtered. At 3.3v it puts out around 140v under load, and around 270v if allowed to float,” the Reddit user explained.

“To switch the HV, I’m using a Supertex HV5122 high voltage shift register which gives me 32 channels. Since I only have 32, the high digit of the hour only has digits 1 and 2 connected, so to display ‘0’ I just leave it off. The 4 BS108 MOSFETs on the board are just level shifters for the control lines, since the HV5122 needs a minimum of around 10.5v for logic ‘high’ on its input.”

Additional information and schematics for the ATtiny1634-powered Nixie clock can be found here.

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, the high-performance Atmel picoPower 8-bit AVR RISC-basedATtiny1634 microcontroller features 16KB flash memory, 256B EEPROM, 1KB SRAM, 18 general purpose I/O lines, 32 general purpose working registers, one 8-bit timer/counter and one 16-bit timer/counter.

Additional key specs include two full duplex USARTs with start frame detection,  universal serial interface (USI), I2C slave, internal and external interrupts, a 12-channel 10-bit A/D converter, programmable watchdog timer with Ultra Low Power internal oscillator and four software selectable power saving modes (the device operates between 1.8-5.5 volts).