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Downloading the definition file

Download the zForce® PDU definition file herezForce® PDU definition files from Downloads.

The zForce message

The communication protocol uses three types of messages:

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• Address is an octet string with 2 octets, device type and index:
  '<device type><index>'H. The available device types are:

  Device type	Device
  0	Platform
  1	Core
  2	Air
  3	Plus
  4	Lightning

  Example: ‘0000’H for platform (there can be only one platform device per sensor system).
  
  

• Timestamp is an integer representing int16 counting at 32768 Hz.

Device Information

The deviceInformation command fetches for example the product id and the FW version. What information that is available differs depending on the type of device. The following example shows a response from a platform device.

  deviceInformation {
  }

  deviceInformation {
    platformInformation {
      platformVersionMajor 7,
      platformVersionMinor 0,
      protocolVersionMajor 1,
      protocolVersionMinor 5,
      firmwareVersionMajor 1,
      firmwareVersionMinor 0,
      hardwareIdentifier "Demo board",
      hardwareVersion "R2",
      asicType nn1002,
      numberOfAsics 1,
      mcuUniqueIdentifier '340038000E51333439333633'H,
      projectReference "DEMO_1.0_REL",
      platformReference "734cebd",
      buildTime "16:01:14",
      buildDate "2016-07-01"    
	}
  }

The fields have the following meaning:

• • platformVersion: FW platform version, version 7.0 in the example.
  • protocolVersion: communication protocol version, version 1.5 in the example.
  • firmwareVersion: product FW version, version 1.0 in the example.
  • hardware: product hardware, configuration and revision.
  • asicType: which type of the Neonode optical scanner ASIC is used, and count.
  • mcuUniqueIdentifier: identifier created at mcu manufacturing.
  • projectReference: FW GIT tags or hashes. Product specific. Uniquely identifies the FW revision.
  • platformReference: FW GIT tags or hashes. Uniquely identifies generic firmware base commit for the platform.
  • buildTime: time of build in Central European Time, a string.
  • buildDate: date of build, a string. 

Device Count

The deviceCount command enumerates the available virtual devices.

  deviceCount {
  }

  deviceCount {
    totalNumberOfDevices 1,
    airDevices 1
  }

Device type instances are indexed from zero. The response shown here means that the only virtual device available is Air[0].

Frequency

The frequency command changes the update frequency of all sensor modules globally, that is for all devices on all platforms.

The following update frequencies can be set, if enabled in the product:

• finger: activated when objects with characteristics matching regular fingers are detected.
• stylus: activated for narrow stylus-like objects. (Not enabled for Neonode Touch Sensor Module.)
• idle: activated when no objects are detected, in order to minimize power usage.

The unit is Hz.

  frequency {
    finger 30,
    idle 10
  }

The response contains the current frequency settings of the product:

  frequency {
    finger 30,
    idle 10
  }

In this example, the sensor module update frequency will be 30 Hz as long as finger-like objects were recently detected. When no objects are detected, the frequency will drop to 10 Hz.

Touch Sensor

There are a number of different sensor module products that can co-exist on the same physical device. There are some product-specific commands, but the ones listed here are general.

The Touch Sensor Module will be used as example, which means that the device address will be the first Air virtual device

'0200'H

Operation Mode

The operationMode command sets what processing to perform on the sensor modules signals, and what diagnostics that are exposed.

The following example sets the operation mode to normal object detection:

  operationMode {
    detection TRUE,
    signals FALSE,
    ledLevels FALSE,
    detectionHid FALSE,
    gestures FALSE
  }

  operationMode {
    detection TRUE,
    signals FALSE,
    ledLevels FALSE,
    detectionHid FALSE
  }

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As can be seen gestures are missing in the response. This is a valid response, since the device is built with a subset of the protocol, or an older forward-compatible version.

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The touchFormat command retrieves the binary format of the detected objects. 

  touchFormat {
  }

  touchFormat {
    touchDescriptor { id, event, loc-x-byte1, loc-x-byte2, loc-y-byte1, loc-y-byte2, size-x-byte1, size-y-byte1 }
  }

The touchDescriptor is a bit string, where each bit signifies one byte of payload being included in the touchNotification octet strings. A touchNotification is the concatenation of those bytes. The following table lists all bits. Bits used in the example are marked green.

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• a 32 bit signed integer that has variable length between 1-4 byte (dynamic) representing values between 0-2^31-1 at 32 KHz +/- 5%.

Commands:

Protocol version 1.12

Protocol version 1.11

Protocol version 1.10

Protocol version 1.9

Protocol version 1.8

Protocol version 1.7

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Location and size coordinates can be specified with up to 3 bytes. The byte order in decreasing significance - big-endian. For example:

• 1 byte: location x = loc-x-byte1
• 2 bytes: location x = (loc-x-byte1 << 8) + loc-x-byte2
• 3 bytes: location x = (loc-x-byte1 << 16) + (loc-x-byte2 << 8) + loc-x-byte3

Location is signed, and size is not.

The location coordinate scale is one of two systems, depending on which detector is used:

• Physical: Robair Air and Core detectors: The unit is 0.1 mm. A coordinate value of 463 thus means 46.3 mm from origin.
• Relative: Triangles and Shape Air detectors: Fraction of the largest screen dimension as fixed point with 14 bits after the radix point (q14). On a widescreen display, the horizontal axis ranges [0, 2¹⁴[, and vertical [0, 2¹⁴ * 9/16[ ([0, 16383], [0, 9215]).

Size is in mm.

Confidence and pressure are fractions of the full values, in percent.

Enable Execution

The enable command activates the Touch Sensor Module, and notifications of detections start to stream.

  enable {
    enable 0
  }

  enable {
    enable
  }

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  enable {
    disable NULL
  }

  enable {
    disable NULL
  }

Touch Notifications

A detected object is reported with a touchNotification. The touchNotification payload is a touchDescriptor bit string. Every concurrently tracked object is represented by its own touchNotification payload.

notificationMessage touchNotifications: {
    '0001013600730A0A64'H
  },

The following table shows the value of the example payload interpreted with the touch descriptor.  

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The touchNotification is from a Core device and translates to "Object 0 moved. Location is (31.0, 11.5) mm. Size is 10x10 mm."

Information

The command deviceInformation retrieves some information about the virtual device instance.

  deviceInformation {
  }

  deviceInformation {
    deviceInstanceInformation {
      productVersionMajor 1,
      productVersionMinor 38,
      physicalWidth 1584,
      physicalHeight 1341,
      numberOfSignalAxes 0
    }
  }

The response contains the deviceInstanceInformation structure, with the following parts:

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Part

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Description

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productVersion

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The specific type version of the virtual device.

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physical

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Size in unit 0.1 mm. See section Touch Format for the relationship to location coordinates.

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numberOfSignalAxes

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Only applicable for Core devices. The number of sensor arrays, each monitoring one dimension/axis of a touch sensor. Generally 2.

Configuration

Some configurations of the Touch Sensor Module can be changed at run-time. The deviceConfiguration request command and command response are identical, except some configuration items in the request may be omitted in order to leave them in their current state.

For instance, to set object size restrictions only, omit all other items:

  deviceConfiguration {
    sizeRestriction {
      maxSizeEnabled TRUE,
      maxSize 100,
      minSizeEnabled FALSE
    }
  }

The command response contains the state of all configuration items:

  deviceConfiguration {
    subTouchActiveArea {
      lowBoundX 0,
      lowBoundY 0,
      highBoundX 1584,
      highBoundY 1341,
      reverseX FALSE,
      reverseY FALSE,
      flipXY FALSE,
      offsetX 0,
      offsetY 0
    },
    sizeRestriction {
      maxSizeEnabled FALSE,
      maxSize 0,
      minSizeEnabled FALSE,
      minSize 0
    },
    detectionMode default,
    numberOfReportedTouches 2,
    hidDisplaySize {
      x 1584,
      y 1341
    }
  }

The items are:

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• default: finger and stylus
• finger: Finger only
• mergeTouches: Merges all touch objects into one
• insensitiveFTIR: Unsupported

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