26-02-2013, 02:25 PM
Digital Slate: Replacing the Paper Notepad
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ABSTRACT
"Save paper, save trees" is a hot agenda in today's world. This
paper presents an ingenuous approach to achieve the motto, by
proposing a software-only design, through modeling a paper
notepad digitally. It describes the financial and social
significance of this model underlining its implementation. The
paper also briefs about the underlying hardware selected for the
design implementation. The hardware utilizes ARM processor
and is quite portable. Its known as Mini2440 FriendlyARM.
Throughout the paper, optimization (power, memory etc.) has
been primarily focused yielding to a recommendable solution.
INTRODUCTION
As embedded systems, currently, are moving towards
versatility, their cost has increased by a substantial amount.
Though their current cost is lesser than their original inventive
cost due to the adaptations in the field of technology, yet
finding a cheap device dedicated to a specific task is a tough
job. The normal consumer electronics shall only comprise of
high-end ultra-versatile devices which are multi-solution
focused and hence cost greater as per the required usage. This
paper is dedicated to one such task specific scenario. Paper
notepads are a product which cover a wide range of paper
market including graph-pads, copies, books etc. The device
proposed further has in its design the core idea to “save trees”
by replacing the conventional “paper” notepads. For this
particular implementation a specific device namely MINI2440
Friendly ARM[6] has been considered, on which a minimalistic
environment similar to a paper notepad is generated. It has
been kept in mind all the way long from design to
implementation of the environment to be as less resource
consuming as possible, to facilitate scaling down of hardware
and thus making it cheaper. All the work proposed here is
based entirely on the software design rather than focusing on
internals of hardware structure.
Paper Schema
This paper intends to describe the merging of various
appropriate technologies to replicate the environment of a paper
notepad. The appropriateness of these technologies is stated in
the terms of the design proposed. Furthermore, the paper
demonstrates a few techniques specific to the environment
which introduce further improvement in power-efficiency.
Section 2 describes some high level designs which may have
been speculated considering the common embedded software
technologies. Next it focuses on an implementation specific
design which serves “better” for the primary objective.
Section 3 presents the significance of such a device, with a
social and financial perspective.
Section 4 includes a brief procedure to realize the design.
Section 5 depicts a few experimental results supporting the
idea.,
DESIGN OVERVIEW
To achieve a digital environment that can act as a replica of a
paper notepad we need a hardware which can be of a
comparable physical size of a notepad and supports handwriting
as input and displays the same. So basically we are asking for a
touch screen and a board which has a decent processor so as to
compute all the necessary details of the environment. For this
we can choose any hand-held complying to our specifications.
After that we try to figure out what sorts of software design can
recreate the maximum possible genuine notepad environment
and yet consume the minimum available resources.
Comparison
With the design finalized we need to sort out the advantages of
it over the others. Building up the significance right from the
bottom, we chose *nix as the heart of the device. Since these
OS'es are FOSS, implementation and requirement based
modification can be constructed on the kernel itself. Some
techniques discussed later in Section 4 can be implemented on
the kernel, and hence the need for *nix. Coming back to
previous designs most of them required a middle layer to
handle the application level params. Therefore utilizing QTE in
the design subtracts one extra layer process to keep running for
monitoring apps. With QTE's buffer draw mechanism,
application can directly ask the OS to give it the resources as
contrasted to the indirect middle layer approach. Developing in
QTE also provides two extra vantage points. First that QT itself
follow object-oriented approach(OOA) through c++ and
encourages the same in terms of application development.
Without getting into further details, it is to be stated that
implementation itself gets better using OOA. Second that QTE
is specifically designed for efficient code development when it
comes to less resource consumption. Direct Buffer Rendering is
a proof for that cause and SVG support is a by-product. SVG
unlike raster graphics can zoom upto 800 %(even more) and
occupies much lesser storage. Since SVG is a collection of xml
files, a simple “gz” compression can reduce its size to 20% of
original. Thus both memory and processing requirements are
minimized in the design.
Specific to the device and app.
Until and unless we write on a notepad with a pencil, we can
safely assert that the copy is not dynamic in nature. Once
written always remains. In such a case managing two or more
subjects is difficult in a single paper notepad. Even with a
pencil, we might have to encounter a lot of erasing when it
comes to managing notes. A digitized version of the notepad
can actually make use of a filesystem where directories can
represent Subject/Topics and their contents user's manuscripts.
Apart from this a completely new feature of zooming becomes
accessible. This feature removes the restriction of a page limit
upto a certain point. Higher Data Storage is naturally an addon
to the digital counter part of a paper notepad. Mobility can be
guaranteed using customized batteries. Since the device,
specific to the implementation, has a touch screen, so the look
and feel of a paper copy is replicated closely and thus enables
users to adapt to the newer digital environments, quickly.
In terms of usage following advantages can be postulated:
While the size of a paper page may restrict a user to write/draw
abnormally from their original freehand(smaller or larger),
using the device zooming in and out capabilities they can
always stick to their comfortable selves.
CONCLUSION & THE WAY AHEAD
This paper presented an idea to develop an eco-friendly
device. having a simple but rarely implemented design in its
core. We discussed about a candidate design that uses nothing
novel in terms of technology, yet yielding a potential product.
It has also been illustrated how different measures can be taken
to optimize the functionality of the device.
As the notepad app gets developed it paves a way for
encouraging scaling down of hardware. In the end we need a
device which is both efficient and “cheap”. The cost more or
less depends on the hardware and hence the need for scaling
down. With advancement in hardware the original designs may
be reused and solution can be even better and yet cheaper.