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Show HN: Weylus – Use your tablet as graphic tablet/touch screen on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23443430 - June 2020 (42 comments)

My smartphone has a camera on its back. It is probably not convenient, but can it be used to detect motion so that my phone could be used as a mouse?

KDE Connect can be used to move your mouse, too.

By dragging it around as an optical mouse?

More like a touch pad on the screen

> No apps except a modern browser (Firefox 80+, iOS/iPadOS 13+) are required on your tablet.

Huh, so that means it should work on anything with a touch screen and a modern browser, no? For example, a Steam Deck would work too?

Any browser that supports "PointerEvents" I think will do it (canIuse indicates its all of the them..). There is a How it works section at the bottom, which is interesting:

"Modern browsers expose so called PointerEvents that can convey not only mouse but additionally stylus/pen and touch information. Weylus sets up a webserver with the corresponding javascript code to capture these events. The events are sent back to the server using websockets.".......

https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus#how-does-this-work

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Seems like it but the Steam Deck touch screen is horrendously bad though, so that wouldn't be very useful.

Great.... Just what I was searching a long time ago to give a new life to my old Tablet PC

Look like the latency isn't great from the Gif.

This might be why, it's using TCP instead of UDP?

    sudo ufw allow 1701/tcp
    sudo ufw allow 9001/tcp

https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus#running

I’m guessing because it’s wireless instead of plugged in. I bet a wired USB TCP connection would be much faster.

Also, if you notice, the laptop response is much faster. To me, this suggests that the drawing on the tablet might require a round trip back to the server. If so, it could probably be sped up by drawing locally/async.

First thing I noticed. Modern Pro tablets advertise latency in the 20ms range, this looks like a few hundred ms.

Creator here: The last time I did measurements for the latency of mirroring the screen I got about 60ms (over WIFI). The Gif is from way back before I did any optimizations at all.

Thanks for commenting.

Respectful suggestion that you have no obligation to follow up on, but it might be a good idea to replace that gif with a more recent capture, or even to just remove it? I ran into your project a while ago, before it got featured on here, and that specific gif is the sole reason I never looked into it any further; my immediate reaction was just, "oh, never mind, it looks like the latency is too high to be useful."

Seeing your comment here is actually a happy surprise since I remember thinking at the time that it would be a really cool project if only the latency was even just a bit better :)

60ms is still probably too high for most drawing (of course to be fair, WIFI I'm sure is a big part of that), but it's usable enough that I don't think I would have dismissed the project outright if I had known that the gif wasn't representative.

Either way though, cool project, and I appreciate the clarification.

Thanks for the reply! Good to hear, thanks!

I wish I had discovered this before getting rid of my old android 4.4 tablet.

does this support using old android tablets?

"No apps except a modern browser (Firefox 80+, iOS/iPadOS 13+) are required on your tablet"

So no. My old samsung galaxy note 10.1 would be perfect for this, too, but I cannot upgrade its browser anymore since years ..

What about installing fennec from f-droid? Doesn't work?

"This version requires Android 5.0 or newer."

- https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

Just install a custom rom from some random XDA post, it will be just as secure as running an ancient OS

Not all devices have an unlockable bootloader, unfortunately. Lots of unnecessary e-waste due to this. Amazon's tablets are one of the worst offenders.

Hm, I could give it a try again, but I think it did not work last time I tried (some years ago).

Can i take a guess?

HP Touchpad?

A toshiba one whose bootloder was never unlocked.