Ken Gudan

46.2: Real-Time Pen Tracking on Electronic Paper Displays

On most electronic paper displays (EPDs), low update rates lead to a poor user experience especially for pen-based markups. The slow update causes a remarkable delay between pen motion and visibility of the stroke. Even worse, this delay varies depending on the current part of the update cycle. This paper presents a real-time pen tracking method for EPDs, using a new display driver on an unmodified E Ink hardware platform. This method compares favorably to the iLiad E-Reader.

A Mechanically Beam-Steered Phased Array Antenna for Power-Harvesting Applications [Antenna Applications Corner]

Beam-steered antennas are highly desirable for radio-frequency (RF)- power-harvesting applications. By changing the direction of its main beam, maximum power can be harvested without physically rotating the antenna. This is specifically favorable to power-harvesting applications where the harvesting unit needs to be placed on a planar surface, cannot be rotated, and the available volume is constrained. We present a 2 X 2 beam-steered phased array antenna for RF-power-harvesting applications. The designed antenna array achieves a continuous beam-steering angle of ?3? in the E-plane. Beam steering is realized by mechanically shifting the position of the feeding point. The antenna does not utilize any active elements; thereby, the maximum amount of power can be delivered into the harvesting circuitry. A small and wideband patch antenna element has also been designed and incorporated in the array, which reduces its overall size and enables wide scanning angle impedance matching. At the operating frequency of 2.4 GHz, the size of the array is 0.96 X 0.96 X 0.056 ?. The measured peak gain is 11.3 dBi, and bandwidth is 12.9%.

An e-writer for documents plus strokes

This paper describes the hardware, software, and a document model for a prototype E-Writer. Paper like displays have proved useful in E-Readers like the Kindle in part because of low power usage and the ability to read indoors and out. We focus on emulating other properties of paper in the E-Writer: everyone knows how to use it, and users can write anywhere on the page. By focusing on a simple document model consisting primarily of images and strokes we enabled rapid application development that integrates easily with current paper-based document workflows. This paper includes preliminary reports on usage of the E-Writer and its software by a small test group.