TWI709071B - Touch pad driving system and method - Google Patents

Abstract

The invention provides a touch pad driving system and method. The touch pad driving system includes a touch pad controller, a touch pad driver, an application, and a service program. The touch pad controller is coupled to a touch pad for generating touch data corresponding to touch gesture operation signals received on the touch pad. The touch pad driver collects the touch data generated by the touch pad controller. The application is responsible for the touch gesture parameter setting. The service program is responsible for calling the application and providing touch gesture processing. Therefore, with the touch pad driving system and method, the smoothness of touch control can be provided without delaying the speed of gesture processing and, when the system is abnormal and restarted without interrupting power, the touch pad can be used as a mouse without causing the system to crash.

Description

Touch panel driving system and method

The present invention relates to the technical field of touch panels, in particular to a touch panel driving system and method.

Touch pads have gradually become standard equipment in various consumer electronic products and computer devices. For example, today’s notebook computers have a touch pad to provide users with the exception of mouse and keyboard In addition to another input function, and with the development of touch sensing technology, the touchpad has evolved from only providing single-finger control functions to being able to perform multiple inputs with various touch gestures, and more touch The applicability of the board.

Since the touchpad is set on an electronic product such as a notebook computer as a hardware input device, it must be equipped with a software driver to work properly. As shown in Figure 1, it illustrates the conventional touchpad. Driver architecture, where the touchpad 101 in the hardware part of the device is controlled by a touchpad controller 103, and the system software part includes the touchpad driver 104, service resident program 105 and application 106 Wait. The service resident program 105 is a program that resides in the system and is used to call the application 106. The touchpad controller 103 communicates with the touchpad driver 104 via a connection such as PS/2 or I2C. In particular, For the touch gesture operation that the user touches on the touchpad 101, the touchpad controller 103 will correspondingly generate touch data, such as the coordinate, area and intensity of the touch, and the touchpad driver 104 is Responsible for collecting the touch data, and the application performs gestures and other processing based on the collected touch data to determine the touch gestures performed by the user, and then reports it to the Operating System (OS) to complete The corresponding touch operation.

With the aforementioned touchpad driver architecture, the application 106 is responsible for gestures and other processing. When the operating system is busy, the system priority of the application 106 is lower. At this time, if the application 106 closes unexpectedly, a service is required The resident program 105 calls the application 106 again, causing the touchpad 101 to be slow or unusable. Also, because the application 106 uses the Windows API (Application Programming Interface) to report system permissions, if the application 106 An unexpected pause will cause the touchpad 101 to become unusable.

Therefore, the driver structure of the conventional touch panel is still imperfect, and it is necessary to improve it.

The purpose of the present invention is mainly to provide a touch panel driving system and method, in which the speed of gesture processing is not easy to delay and can improve the smoothness of touch, and when the system is abnormal and restarts without power, the touch panel It can still be used as a mouse without causing the system to crash. In addition, in one embodiment, a virtual device with the same permissions as the hardware HID device can be selectively set in the touchpad driver, and There is no system permission problem encountered in the Windows API reporting system.

According to a feature of the present invention, the present invention provides a touch panel driving system, which includes a touch panel controller coupled to a touch panel to respond to touch gesture operation signals received on the touch panel , Corresponding to generate touch data; a touchpad driver, which collects the touch data generated by the touchpad controller; an application program, responsible for setting touch gesture parameters; and a service resident program, responsible for calling the application program And provide touch gesture processing.

According to another feature of the present invention, the present invention provides a touchpad driving method, which is implemented in a touchpad driving system including a touchpad controller, a touchpad driver, an application and a service resident The touchpad controller can operate in a default mouse mode or a reporting touch coordinate mode. The driving method includes steps: (A) The service resident program confirms whether the touchpad driver exists; (B) When it is confirmed that the touchpad driver exists, the service resident program continuously sends a switching command to the touchpad controller through the touchpad driver; (C) After receiving the switching command, touch The control panel controller switches to the reporting touch coordinate mode; (D) The touch panel controller determines whether it has exceeded a predetermined time without receiving the switch command of the touch panel driver, if so, the touch control The board controller switches the mouse mode, otherwise, proceed to step (A).

The above summary and the following detailed description are exemplary in nature, and are intended to further illustrate the scope of the patent application of the present invention. Other objectives and advantages of the present invention will be described in the following description and drawings.

In order to make the objectives, technical solutions, and advantages of the present invention clearer, the following further describes the present invention in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings and embodiments. It should be understood that the specific embodiments described here are only used to explain the present invention, but not to limit the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of the use environment of the touch panel driving system of the present invention, wherein the touch panel driving system is installed on an electronic product such as a notebook computer 21, which is provided with a touch pad 23 is used as an input device, the touchpad 23 can be used as a mouse, that is, the user slides or touches the finger on the touchpad 23 to perform operations equivalent to mouse movements or keystrokes. In addition, according to the installed touchpad driving system, the touchpad 23 can be used as a touch input device for the user to perform various input operations with a variety of predefined touch gestures. The control board 23 receives touch gesture operation signals. Although the present invention is described with a notebook computer as a specific embodiment, those skilled in the art can apply the present invention to various human-machine interface electronic products, so this embodiment is not intended to limit the present invention.

FIG. 3 is a structural diagram of an embodiment of the touch panel driving system of the present invention. The touchpad driving system 30 includes a touchpad controller 301, a touchpad driver 303, a service resident program 305, and an application program 307. The touchpad controller 301 is coupled to the touchpad 23 to generate touch data corresponding to the touch gesture operation signals received on the touchpad 23, such as the coordinates, area, and The touch panel controller 301 communicates with the touch panel driver 303 via a connection such as PS/2 or I2C, so that the touch panel driver 303 collects the touch data.

In the aforementioned touchpad driving system 30, the touch gesture processing is provided by the service resident program 305, and the touch gesture parameter setting is taken care of by the application program 307. The touch gesture processing includes the selected item (point Choose touchpad 23), scroll (the user puts two fingers on the touchpad 23, and then slide horizontally or vertically), zoom in or zoom out (the user puts two fingers on the touchpad 23, then pinch or Expand), show more commands (the user taps on the touchpad 23 with two fingers, or press the lower right corner), view all open windows (the user puts three fingers on the touchpad 23 to leave The user moves his finger in the direction of the user), displays the desktop (the user puts three fingers on the touchpad 23 and moves his finger toward the user), and switches between open windows (the user puts three fingers on the touch On the control board 23, flick to the right or left), etc., and the touch gesture parameters include touch point movement speed and touch sensitivity.

Therefore, the service resident program 305 resident in the system is not only responsible for calling the application 307, but also provides a touch gesture processing function to determine the corresponding touch based on the touch data collected by the touchpad driver 303. Control gestures. Compared with the conventional technology, the touchpad driving system 30 of the present invention moves the gesture processing from the application 307 to the service resident program 305 for processing, but the application 307 is still responsible for the touch gesture parameter setting. In this way, since the service resident program 305 has a higher priority in the operating system (higher than the application 307), placing the gesture processing in the service resident program 305 for processing will make the speed of gesture processing not easy to delay, thus increasing The smoothness of touch, and the parameter setting is taken care of by the application 307, can comply with UWP (Universal Windows Platform) specifications and have excellent system compatibility.

4 is a flowchart of the touch panel driving method of the present invention, which is executed in the touch panel driving system 30 shown in FIG. 3. Wherein, the touchpad controller 301 in the aforementioned touchpad driving system 30 can operate in a mouse mode or a reporting touch coordinate mode, and the touchpad controller 301 operates in the mouse mode to indicate the touchpad The 23 series is configured to be equivalent to a mouse to provide electronic product input functions; the touchpad controller 301 operates in the reporting touch coordinate mode, which means that the touchpad controller 301 can touch the user The touch data (including the coordinate, area, and intensity of the touch) generated by the touch gesture operation on the board 23 is reported to the touchpad driver 303 to provide the electronic product gesture touch input function.

In the touchpad driving method of the present invention, the touchpad controller 301 is preset to the mouse mode, and only switches to the reporting touch coordinate mode when necessary. First, the service resident program 305 resides in the system Run (step S401), and confirm whether the touchpad driver 303 exists (step S402), if the touchpad driver 303 does not exist, the service resident program 305 continues to run to confirm whether the touchpad driver 303 exists, and vice versa If the touchpad driver 303 exists, the service resident program 305 continuously sends a switching command to the touchpad controller 301 through the touchpad driver 303 (step S403), and the touchpad controller 301 receives the switching command After that, it switches to the mode of reporting touch coordinates (step S404), and the touchpad controller 301 determines whether it receives a switch command from the touchpad driver 303 within a predetermined period of time, that is, whether it has exceeded The predetermined time without receiving the switch command of the touchpad driver (step S405), wherein the predetermined time is, for example, 0.2 to 0.8 seconds, preferably 0.5 seconds, if it has not timed out, the flow returns to step S401 Execution, that is, the service resident program 305 is resident and running in the system. If it has timed out without receiving a switching command, it will display that the touchpad driver 303 is abnormal, so the touchpad controller 301 is switched to the mouse mode ( Step S406). According to an embodiment of the present invention, in the aforementioned step S403, the service resident program 305 continuously transmits the switching command to the touch panel controller 301 in a certain manner through the touch panel driver 303, that is, every other fixed The switching command needs to be transmitted in time, but the present invention is not limited to this. In another embodiment of the present invention, the method of transmitting the switching command in the foregoing step S403 may also be an untimely continuous manner. For example, the time interval between two transmissions of the switching command is not fixed.

Using the aforementioned touchpad driving method, the service resident program 305 will first confirm whether the touchpad driver 303 exists, and only when the touchpad driver 303 exists, will it issue an instruction to the touchpad driver 303 to enable the touchpad The driver 303 continuously sends a switching command to the touchpad controller 301 to switch to the reporting touch coordinate mode, and within the predetermined time, if the touchpad driver 303 does not send a switching command, the touchpad controller 301 Switch back to mouse mode. In this way, when the system is abnormal and the electronic product is restarted without power, the touchpad controller 301 will automatically switch to the mouse mode, so that the touchpad 23 can still be used as a mouse to output the mouse to The system works without causing the system to crash and completely unable to control the dilemma of electronic products.

FIG. 5 is a structural diagram of another embodiment of the touch panel driving system of the present invention, which is similar to the embodiment of the touch panel driving system 30 of FIG. 3, but is similar to the touch panel driving system 50 of FIG. 5 Virtual Device 509 can be set in the control panel driver 503, such as computer keyboard and braille display, pointing device (mouse, trackball, touchpad, pointing stick, light pen), touch screen, Digital drawing tablets, joysticks, handles, analog joysticks, fingerprint scanners, etc., a virtual HID (Human Interface Device) device is generated by the touchpad driver 503, and other HID devices, such as games, can also be virtualized through the virtual device 509 The virtual device 509 is reported to the operating system by the touchpad driver 503, so that the virtual device 509 has the same permissions as the hardware HID device, instead of the Windows API reporting system. Encountered the problem of system permissions. In addition, the operation of the touch panel controller 501, the touch panel driver 503, the service resident program 505 and the application program 507 of the touch panel driving system 50 of this embodiment are the same as those of the touch panel driving system of FIG. 3 The embodiment of 30 is the same, so it will not be repeated.

The above-mentioned embodiments are merely examples for the convenience of description, and the scope of rights claimed in the present invention should be subject to the scope of the patent application, rather than limited to the above-mentioned embodiments.

101: Touchpad 103: Touchpad controller 104: Touchpad driver 105: Service resident program 106: Application 21: laptop 23: Touchpad 30, 50: Touchpad drive system 301,501: Touchpad controller 303,503: touchpad driver 305,505: Service resident program 307,507: Apps 509: Virtual Device S401~S406: steps

Figure 1 is a diagram of the driver structure of a conventional touchpad. FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of the use environment of the touch panel driving system of the present invention. FIG. 3 is a structural diagram of an embodiment of the touch panel driving system of the present invention. FIG. 4 is a flowchart of the touch panel driving method of the present invention. FIG. 5 is a structural diagram of another embodiment of the touch panel driving system of the present invention.

S401-S406: steps

Claims (10)

A touch panel driving system includes: a touch panel controller coupled to a touch panel to generate touch data corresponding to touch gesture operation signals received on the touch panel; The board driver collects the touch data generated by the touchpad controller; an application program is responsible for setting touch gesture parameters; and a service resident program is responsible for calling the application program and providing touch gesture processing. For the touch panel driving system described in claim 1, wherein the touch panel controller operates in a mouse mode or a reporting touch coordinate mode. For the touchpad drive system described in item 2 of the scope of patent application, wherein the touchpad controller is operated in the mouse mode by default, and after confirming the existence of the touchpad driver, the service The resident program continuously transmits a switching command to the touch panel controller through the touch panel driver to switch the touch panel controller to the reporting touch coordinate mode. For the touchpad drive system described in item 3 of the scope of patent application, when the touchpad controller is operating in the reporting touch coordinate mode, if within a predetermined time, the touchpad driver does not Sending the switch command will switch the touchpad controller back to the mouse mode. For the touch panel driving system described in the first item of the patent application, a virtual device is provided in the touch panel driver, and the virtual device is reported to the operating system by the touch panel driver. For the touch panel driving system described in the first item of the patent application, the touch data includes the coordinates, area and intensity of the touch. For example, the touch pad drive system described in the first item of the patent application, wherein the touch gesture processing includes: selecting items, scrolling, zooming in or out, displaying more commands, viewing all open windows, displaying the desktop, And switch between open windows. In the touch panel driving system described in the first item of the patent application, the touch gesture parameters include touch point movement speed and touch sensitivity. A touchpad driving method is implemented in a touchpad driving system including a touchpad controller, a touchpad driver, an application program, and a service resident program. The touchpad controller can operate on a The default mouse mode or a report touch coordinate mode, the driving method includes the steps: (A) The service resident program confirms whether the touchpad driver exists; (B) When confirming that the touchpad driver exists , The service resident program continuously sends a switching command to the touch panel controller through the touch panel driver; (C) After receiving the switching command, switch the touch panel controller to the reported touch coordinate Mode; and (D) the touchpad controller determines whether it has exceeded a predetermined time without receiving the switch command of the touchpad driver, if so, switch the touchpad controller to the mouse mode, otherwise, Perform step (A). According to the method for driving a touch panel according to the scope of patent application, in step (B), the switching command includes continuous transmission in a timing or irregular manner.

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