"CabinetiQ": A DIY "Cintiq" and Lots&Lots of Hotkeys
Channel: Da Botz
Date: 2014-02-12

In summer 2013 I felt a urge, to try and place an LCD on top of the Intuos 4 L that I had bought in Autumn 2012. At the time it seemed sensible (if you already have the tablet, it is a sensible thing... you end having a Cintiq-like device with, around, a 150 $ expense that, if you buy every piece new).

I used the specs from the TabletMod site to choose the LCD Panel, and it worked all relatively well.

The LCD isn't all that great, narrow angles and a 6bit colour space, but its narrow viewing angles "cured" me of a lot of prospective aberrations induced by my astigmatism so, even its main shortcoming had a silver lining. 

Colours aren't that good, too, but  I am a b&w dog... and I use a 22" Philips IPS screen to check colours.

Most important, it does not interfere much with the Intuos4 tablet, so jitter is almost nil (unless something screws up, like the screen power adapter or the USB hub).

One of the thing I didn't initially really thought about was, where to put the keyboard. 

Leaving the keyboard on the desk meant working with arms at a wildly different height, an action to whom I was not accustomed and soon led me top develop muscular aches in my back. 

Also, placed on the side, some keys ended a bit too far for my taste. 

The solution I finally found was to use a small program called HidMacros (I use Windows... please, people, don't shoot me)  to "reprogram" the keys in an auxiliary  keyboard, that I stacked vertically on the left side (I'm dextrose) of the screen-tablet.

HidMacros lightened up my hubris, as it allows to assign macros also to some of the mouses actions too (the great thing of HM is that it differentiates between each and every HID compatible device connected to a PC, so you can assign macros to every key of any keyboard and buttons of any mouse you need, without interference between the various devices, still  keep a mouse and a keyboard for "normal" use).

I initially conjured just one wheel, for the zoom function, but I made some pretty bad design errors, and I ended up with having to rebuild the wheel support to eliminate his excess cables as I discovered, to my horror, that the USB standard offers almost no protection against EMF interferences picked up by the various devices.

Also, there was probably some problem with the screen power adapter... Which happened to be one of the things that the last electric storm fried in my home (yes, buy stuff without warranty is not much of an option in stormy Galicia).

Finally, I ended with having the actual set-up....   it works fine for my style of drawing.