Sweet. I've been using these pens literally for decades and have waited that long for a detailed explanation of how they work. I'd guessed the general outlines but this was wonderfully clear and detailed.
Great video! Love seeing more people talk about EMR tech. I cover it extensively in my channel and was really happy to see this video pop up in me recommended feed!
Fantastic explanation. Not dumbed down. Dude, you would be an excellent physics instructor that takes time to explain without being overly complicated yet accurate. First time seeing anyone talk about electromagetic fields, induction, capacitance, etc in a commercial product explanation like this.
Wow, What an excellent video, so well presented, this gives me a full understanding of how this works and gives me the knowledge to trouble shoot any problems I may encounter in the future. Thanks so much Voja
Not just the information but also the precision and perfection of the language and vocabulary conducting this valuable elite information . One of the side effects of watching Voja's videos is developing my English language.
Nice video! I've been a fan of EMR tech since around 2004 when I was trying to leverage my meager budget into digital arts and couldn't afford a full-on Wacom Cintiq. I ended up salvaging tech from the old Penabled tablets which had flooded the market around 2000. A few items of interest: The Wacom antenna under the screen is used both to charge the pen AND read the pen. But how? -Well, the old Wacom tablets I was tearing down and researching had two clock speeds listed in the various specs, and it confused me for a long time. One was measured in Khz and the other in Hz. I can't recall the actual figure, but the Khz signal was the carrier wave of the field itself, while the low frequency... It was around 110 Hz or so, depending on the model (and my memory). What was that? Well... Turns out that every 110/th of a second, the transmission field which charges the pen toggles on/off, turning the antenna from a transmitter to a receiver and back again 110 times per second. Charge-Listen-Charge-Listen, etc, all on the same hardware substrate, which is why you don't see two antenna grids when you pull apart the screen. How elegant! Next item... The old Penabled tablets could indeed read angle data from the pen; it was baked into Wacom's brilliant hardware on such a deep level that NOT having it there would have required breaking the technology. -However, Wacom execs were worried about diluting their own market for the expensive Cintiq line. They didn't want guys like me drawing professionally on old eBay Tablet PCs for $150. They wanted us to spend a couple thousand on a Cintiq. -So what did they do? Easy! They artificially limited what the Tablet PC systems could do entirely through the driver software. No Tilt For You! (I opened up their standard driver and had a look at the code. It's very interesting in there; lots of dead wood and old barnacles. There are codes for third party manufacturers and tablets which don't even exist anymore, each with little switches for what each model was allowed to do with the hardware they had licensed from Wacom.) -I discovered a way around this limitation accidentally when performing some hardware/driver hackery, but didn't put any time into making it into an application level solution. (I never use tilt information when I draw, so it was only ever a curiosity to me. And besides, these days, the artificial limitation is largely gone. The market is flooded and all the tech is good, so why bother pretending?) Speaking of which... You know how "Pressure Levels" are a big marketing point, with each new iteration claiming even more pressure sensitivity? (That's how it was for years and years, anyway. These days the levels of pressure are so high, it's not really a concern anymore and you can't really squeeze any more marketing copy juice out of the concept. But back in 2004, the low end was pretty low. The Penabled system only offered something like 300 levels of pressure. Wow! You had to buy a proper Cintiq to get a full 1024. I believe today, pressure is measured in thousands of levels, and nobody cares. They just expect fluid pressure response from even the base unit, and they get it. (Interestingly, the average human can only detect around 150 discrete levels of pressure difference in their fingers, so you only notice the limit visually when using large brushes. Since I rarely use anything beyond around 30 pixel brushes to draw, 300 levels was more than enough to cover the range of possible brush states, it never really impacted me at all. The guys using 1000+ pixel brushes sure noticed it, though! Their brush diameter would jump in 10 pixel increments! Very messy. So Wacom had an attentive market each time they brought out the next line of tablets, with users eager to upgrade.) But.., here's the funny thing about Wacom pressure sensitivity. When dealing with an analog signal, you can divide it up as thinly as you like. It's got little to do with hardware, so again, it was a software fabrication. An arbitrary number was set in the driver. If 300 was the number delineating "Most Pressure", why not just change that number to 3000? Then you instantly 10x the 'pressure sensitivity'. It was a great way to get the most out of the invention; you could create new, updated product lines without having to do any new engineering to the core technology. An old stylus from 20 yeas ago could just as easily provide the same 7000 levels of pressure as the latest model, -if Wacom allowed it in the driver. They don't, though. There's a strict artificial limitation in place to ensure that "New and Improved" actually means something. Okay... That's a very long post! I'm just a big fan of the tech and I've had this stuff rattling around in my head for 20 years now. Your channel is great! (Oh.., one other thing. Can you do a review of the new Daylight Computer? That thing looks awesome!) Cheers!
Great explanation, the main takeaway is that traditional Wacom pens are totally passive analogue devices and the tablet figures out *everything* from the resonated magnetic field, which is pretty elegant. However, it appears that not all Wacom pens are purely passive anymore! While I was reading through Wacom patents, I found patent US8525816 which describes both the completely analogue position pointer (FIG. 24), but also a digital version (FIG. 25) which instead harvests energy to drive a CMOS IC. This IC measures the pen pressure and button state from within the pen, and then digitally transmits the information back to the tablet one bit at a time, by rapidly changing the resonance of the coil. I'm not sure how many Wacom pens do this in practice, but the patent is from 2010. It probably provides more accurate pen pressure information than simply changing the resonant frequency of the coil. Regardless, the position and tilt functions are still purely analogue and figured out by the tablet. The pen doesn't contain any sort of accelerometer, like many active pens do.
That's quite interesting, but that might introduce some lag, depending on how the data transmission is. Or would it? That would be interesting to see, which is more efficient, the "layer" doing all the calculations, or the pen sending all the calculations to the "layer". There must be a reason why this is the more widely used standard. But either way, interesting find and thank you very much for sharing :)
@@MyDeepGuide I think maybe the Wacom Pro pens (which are listed to work only with specific tablets like Intuos) use the digital IC system, they have 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity and 3+ buttons, compared to the "standard" passive Wacom EMR pens which list 4096 levels and 2 buttons max. Not really sure why it was necessary, maybe it was too hard to get 3 buttons in an analogue system... or possibly it is just marketing and vendor lock-in, now the pen needs a proprietary IC which only Wacom makes, so they can sell a more expensive pen with their more expensive tablets. Probably doesn't add lag though, it only needs to send a few bits out for pressure and buttons.
I have some detailed videos on EMR and pressure detection in my channel. Good find on the patent! In a modern EMR pen (and Wacom pens have been this way for a long time) the nib presses into a piezoelectric pressure sensor and then that pressure data is digitally encoded into the signal sent to the tablet. In this case the inductor coil in the pen does not move the inductor coil and the resonant frequency does not change. Older EMR pens and pen designs that rely on changing the resonant frequency by having the nib move the coil which then changes the resonant frequency. I point this out because even in my first EMR video I described the older technique but in my more recent pen pressure video I describe the modern technique. Newer pens by XP-Pen (X3 Pro) and Huion (PW600,PW600S) seem to have moved to using an IC with digital encoding of pressure.
I could _Ghost write_ from over two inches away with my Heart of Metal 2 pen, and the only way I could set it right was to gentle tap the pen on my light stand near my chair, in time the metal sleeve within the pen came loose and rattled every time I used it. Yet at about £70 a pen I was concerned but pleasantly surprised when Super note sent a new nib after I contacted them. Thing is, the new nib began to ghost write and not wanting to _'tap'_ that on my light stand, I reverted to the old which eventually broke revealing the innards. I glued it together and the glue must have caught metal sleeve because it hasn't rattled since... but more importantly, *nor ghost write!* So, I have a brand new nib as a back-up, while I write with a slightly crooked pen that I never quite glued straight... but I'm content.
Great for anyone new to the e-ink space, I already knew how it worked but your guide was in depth and simple! Unironacly I use Wacom's One Pen with my rM 1.
nicd and clear explanation. I'll pretend i Understood it ☺. For me I've only played with a couple of the emr devices and one active pen capable device. *emr won me over because of the lower initial activation force (still would be cool if there was a pen where u could turn a screw to calibrate sensitivity (if possible)) *its veen a few year now but i found on the windows laptop the active pens i tried were interesting. it was laggy, but when I deleted a certain background task (which would reappear shortly after) it would become very accurate by comparison. Even though there was more freeplay in the nib I found the cheaper heavier active pen better then the rennaisir pen because the weight would require less effort to engage that little click the nib does to write. * it kind of made me think that active pens r probably as good, but i would prefer the pen to be engaged/on 100% and calibrated in the software by the user (just have a a click on/off on the back or something). For example I jammed something (can't remember what 🤪) into the nib area and adjusted the nib so it was just engaged to write, and i thought that this is more what I'm looking for.
This was great! I've always wondered how the technology works. I had a very high-level intuitive understanding of what was probably going on, but it's great to learn the details. Thanks so much. I regret that I have but one Like to give :)
I'm doing a series on EMR pressure sensitivity on my channel - and I am struggling to find information about what Wacom is doing to get their incredibly low IAF. I hope I'll be able to find out some information in the course of those videos.
Something I'm curious about: on the Supernote, if you double press the Lamy button, you can switch the main function of the nib between normal and eraser. Double click again and you're back to the previous one. So... What's happening with this double click? Very mysterious to me :) And another point: any clue why we dont see pens with, say, two buttons? Would love to have one for erasing and one for lasso'ing. Do you know if there's a limitation for that?
Double press functionality is simple really, device listens to button presses actively. When it detects a button press it also activates a timer, and if another button press is detected within a prefix length of time, action Y is activated, otherwise action X is activated. In this scenario, action X is your single button press tool and action Y is the double press tool. As for two buttons, another user mentioned a very interesting fact that Wacom does have patents for active EMR pens, that do certain things differently, and have 2 buttons. So technically it is possible, but why it is not done on these EMR drivere, I don't know.
Ah I see. I thought the double click was handled at pen level, but it's actually handled by the device itself. And indeed I just tried it and it actually only works if I'm close enough to the screen...
Double click or even tripple clicks are always handled the same way, by the system. System doesn't care where the "click" comes from, so it can be a double-click mouse button, stylus pen, keyboard key, touch input etc.
Yes I have, but that's a completely different thing, and doesn't really have anything to do with this topic. Just on the topic of the pen itself, I have no idea and have nothing to base my opinion on. Everything about it will depend on how it is made and most importantly, how the software services are implemented.
Hello ! Thank you very much for your explanation, it helps. I just wanted to know, maybe it's a bit dumb but are there any risks for health with this technology? As it uses an electromagnelic field... We didn't find the DAS (débit d'absorption spécifique in french) for those pens
Sweet. I've been using these pens literally for decades and have waited that long for a detailed explanation of how they work.
I'd guessed the general outlines but this was wonderfully clear and detailed.
Yes, you got it. Apparently you found the same research I did :) I have not done any youtube videos yet. Thanks for putting it out there for everyone.
Great video! Love seeing more people talk about EMR tech. I cover it extensively in my channel and was really happy to see this video pop up in me recommended feed!
Fantastic explanation. Not dumbed down. Dude, you would be an excellent physics instructor that takes time to explain without being overly complicated yet accurate. First time seeing anyone talk about electromagetic fields, induction, capacitance, etc in a commercial product explanation like this.
Thanks!
Thanks for that. I always wondered and specifically was wondering about the buttons and how they worked.
Wow, What an excellent video, so well presented, this gives me a full understanding of how this works and gives me the knowledge to trouble shoot any problems I may encounter in the future. Thanks so much Voja
Not just the information but also the precision and perfection of the language and vocabulary conducting this valuable elite information . One of the side effects of watching Voja's videos is developing my English language.
Very true ! As a french, I can say my english owes a lot to Voja's work. 😶🌫️
Voja : you did not know that you are an english teacher, did you ?
Heheheh, thank you very much, and no, I certainly did not know that :D
So much Knowledge ❤
Thanx!
Loved this! Communicating technical information to a mass audience is one of the hardest forms of writing/communicating and you nailed it.
Nice video!
I've been a fan of EMR tech since around 2004 when I was trying to leverage my meager budget into digital arts and couldn't afford a full-on Wacom Cintiq. I ended up salvaging tech from the old Penabled tablets which had flooded the market around 2000.
A few items of interest: The Wacom antenna under the screen is used both to charge the pen AND read the pen.
But how?
-Well, the old Wacom tablets I was tearing down and researching had two clock speeds listed in the various specs, and it confused me for a long time. One was measured in Khz and the other in Hz. I can't recall the actual figure, but the Khz signal was the carrier wave of the field itself, while the low frequency... It was around 110 Hz or so, depending on the model (and my memory). What was that?
Well... Turns out that every 110/th of a second, the transmission field which charges the pen toggles on/off, turning the antenna from a transmitter to a receiver and back again 110 times per second. Charge-Listen-Charge-Listen, etc, all on the same hardware substrate, which is why you don't see two antenna grids when you pull apart the screen. How elegant!
Next item...
The old Penabled tablets could indeed read angle data from the pen; it was baked into Wacom's brilliant hardware on such a deep level that NOT having it there would have required breaking the technology. -However, Wacom execs were worried about diluting their own market for the expensive Cintiq line. They didn't want guys like me drawing professionally on old eBay Tablet PCs for $150. They wanted us to spend a couple thousand on a Cintiq. -So what did they do? Easy! They artificially limited what the Tablet PC systems could do entirely through the driver software. No Tilt For You!
(I opened up their standard driver and had a look at the code. It's very interesting in there; lots of dead wood and old barnacles. There are codes for third party manufacturers and tablets which don't even exist anymore, each with little switches for what each model was allowed to do with the hardware they had licensed from Wacom.)
-I discovered a way around this limitation accidentally when performing some hardware/driver hackery, but didn't put any time into making it into an application level solution. (I never use tilt information when I draw, so it was only ever a curiosity to me. And besides, these days, the artificial limitation is largely gone. The market is flooded and all the tech is good, so why bother pretending?)
Speaking of which...
You know how "Pressure Levels" are a big marketing point, with each new iteration claiming even more pressure sensitivity? (That's how it was for years and years, anyway. These days the levels of pressure are so high, it's not really a concern anymore and you can't really squeeze any more marketing copy juice out of the concept. But back in 2004, the low end was pretty low. The Penabled system only offered something like 300 levels of pressure. Wow! You had to buy a proper Cintiq to get a full 1024. I believe today, pressure is measured in thousands of levels, and nobody cares. They just expect fluid pressure response from even the base unit, and they get it. (Interestingly, the average human can only detect around 150 discrete levels of pressure difference in their fingers, so you only notice the limit visually when using large brushes. Since I rarely use anything beyond around 30 pixel brushes to draw, 300 levels was more than enough to cover the range of possible brush states, it never really impacted me at all. The guys using 1000+ pixel brushes sure noticed it, though! Their brush diameter would jump in 10 pixel increments! Very messy. So Wacom had an attentive market each time they brought out the next line of tablets, with users eager to upgrade.)
But.., here's the funny thing about Wacom pressure sensitivity.
When dealing with an analog signal, you can divide it up as thinly as you like. It's got little to do with hardware, so again, it was a software fabrication. An arbitrary number was set in the driver. If 300 was the number delineating "Most Pressure", why not just change that number to 3000? Then you instantly 10x the 'pressure sensitivity'. It was a great way to get the most out of the invention; you could create new, updated product lines without having to do any new engineering to the core technology. An old stylus from 20 yeas ago could just as easily provide the same 7000 levels of pressure as the latest model, -if Wacom allowed it in the driver. They don't, though. There's a strict artificial limitation in place to ensure that "New and Improved" actually means something.
Okay...
That's a very long post! I'm just a big fan of the tech and I've had this stuff rattling around in my head for 20 years now.
Your channel is great!
(Oh.., one other thing. Can you do a review of the new Daylight Computer? That thing looks awesome!)
Cheers!
Great explanation, the main takeaway is that traditional Wacom pens are totally passive analogue devices and the tablet figures out *everything* from the resonated magnetic field, which is pretty elegant.
However, it appears that not all Wacom pens are purely passive anymore! While I was reading through Wacom patents, I found patent US8525816 which describes both the completely analogue position pointer (FIG. 24), but also a digital version (FIG. 25) which instead harvests energy to drive a CMOS IC. This IC measures the pen pressure and button state from within the pen, and then digitally transmits the information back to the tablet one bit at a time, by rapidly changing the resonance of the coil. I'm not sure how many Wacom pens do this in practice, but the patent is from 2010. It probably provides more accurate pen pressure information than simply changing the resonant frequency of the coil.
Regardless, the position and tilt functions are still purely analogue and figured out by the tablet. The pen doesn't contain any sort of accelerometer, like many active pens do.
That's quite interesting, but that might introduce some lag, depending on how the data transmission is. Or would it? That would be interesting to see, which is more efficient, the "layer" doing all the calculations, or the pen sending all the calculations to the "layer". There must be a reason why this is the more widely used standard. But either way, interesting find and thank you very much for sharing :)
@@MyDeepGuide I think maybe the Wacom Pro pens (which are listed to work only with specific tablets like Intuos) use the digital IC system, they have 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity and 3+ buttons, compared to the "standard" passive Wacom EMR pens which list 4096 levels and 2 buttons max. Not really sure why it was necessary, maybe it was too hard to get 3 buttons in an analogue system... or possibly it is just marketing and vendor lock-in, now the pen needs a proprietary IC which only Wacom makes, so they can sell a more expensive pen with their more expensive tablets. Probably doesn't add lag though, it only needs to send a few bits out for pressure and buttons.
I have some detailed videos on EMR and pressure detection in my channel. Good find on the patent! In a modern EMR pen (and Wacom pens have been this way for a long time) the nib presses into a piezoelectric pressure sensor and then that pressure data is digitally encoded into the signal sent to the tablet. In this case the inductor coil in the pen does not move the inductor coil and the resonant frequency does not change. Older EMR pens and pen designs that rely on changing the resonant frequency by having the nib move the coil which then changes the resonant frequency. I point this out because even in my first EMR video I described the older technique but in my more recent pen pressure video I describe the modern technique. Newer pens by XP-Pen (X3 Pro) and Huion (PW600,PW600S) seem to have moved to using an IC with digital encoding of pressure.
Very good video. Great explanations.
I could _Ghost write_ from over two inches away with my Heart of Metal 2 pen, and the only way I could set it right was to gentle tap the pen on my light stand near my chair, in time the metal sleeve within the pen came loose and rattled every time I used it. Yet at about £70 a pen I was concerned but pleasantly surprised when Super note sent a new nib after I contacted them.
Thing is, the new nib began to ghost write and not wanting to _'tap'_ that on my light stand, I reverted to the old which eventually broke revealing the innards. I glued it together and the glue must have caught metal sleeve because it hasn't rattled since... but more importantly, *nor ghost write!* So, I have a brand new nib as a back-up, while I write with a slightly crooked pen that I never quite glued straight... but I'm content.
Great for anyone new to the e-ink space, I already knew how it worked but your guide was in depth and simple!
Unironacly I use Wacom's One Pen with my rM 1.
Thanks for the education.
nicd and clear explanation. I'll pretend i Understood it ☺.
For me I've only played with a couple of the emr devices and one active pen capable device.
*emr won me over because of the lower initial activation force (still would be cool if there was a pen where u could turn a screw to calibrate sensitivity (if possible))
*its veen a few year now but i found on the windows laptop the active pens i tried were interesting. it was laggy, but when I deleted a certain background task (which would reappear shortly after) it would become very accurate by comparison.
Even though there was more freeplay in the nib I found the cheaper heavier active pen better then the rennaisir pen because the weight would require less effort to engage that little click the nib does to write.
* it kind of made me think that active pens r probably as good, but i would prefer the pen to be engaged/on 100% and calibrated in the software by the user (just have a a click on/off on the back or something). For example I jammed something (can't remember what 🤪) into the nib area and adjusted the nib so it was just engaged to write, and i thought that this is more what I'm looking for.
Well now I know why can I write with my finger (and a pen on top of it) on my supernote
Facts facts facts ❤
This was great! I've always wondered how the technology works. I had a very high-level intuitive understanding of what was probably going on, but it's great to learn the details. Thanks so much. I regret that I have but one Like to give :)
I didn't know I wanted to know, but turns out! Thanks!
Does anyone know if you can purchase the tech inside the pen separately from the shell?
Thank you! It's so in time video for me. And as always very simple, yet very informative
I have a question: if pen pressure just a mechanical thing, then why it's so hard to replicate wacom IAF which is
I'm doing a series on EMR pressure sensitivity on my channel - and I am struggling to find information about what Wacom is doing to get their incredibly low IAF. I hope I'll be able to find out some information in the course of those videos.
Something I'm curious about: on the Supernote, if you double press the Lamy button, you can switch the main function of the nib between normal and eraser. Double click again and you're back to the previous one. So... What's happening with this double click? Very mysterious to me :)
And another point: any clue why we dont see pens with, say, two buttons? Would love to have one for erasing and one for lasso'ing. Do you know if there's a limitation for that?
Double press functionality is simple really, device listens to button presses actively. When it detects a button press it also activates a timer, and if another button press is detected within a prefix length of time, action Y is activated, otherwise action X is activated. In this scenario, action X is your single button press tool and action Y is the double press tool.
As for two buttons, another user mentioned a very interesting fact that Wacom does have patents for active EMR pens, that do certain things differently, and have 2 buttons. So technically it is possible, but why it is not done on these EMR drivere, I don't know.
Ah I see. I thought the double click was handled at pen level, but it's actually handled by the device itself. And indeed I just tried it and it actually only works if I'm close enough to the screen...
Double click or even tripple clicks are always handled the same way, by the system. System doesn't care where the "click" comes from, so it can be a double-click mouse button, stylus pen, keyboard key, touch input etc.
Hey question! Have you heard of or seen the Nuwa pen? Would love your thoughts on it as we get closer to a release
Yes I have, but that's a completely different thing, and doesn't really have anything to do with this topic. Just on the topic of the pen itself, I have no idea and have nothing to base my opinion on. Everything about it will depend on how it is made and most importantly, how the software services are implemented.
Hello ! Thank you very much for your explanation, it helps. I just wanted to know, maybe it's a bit dumb but are there any risks for health with this technology? As it uses an electromagnelic field... We didn't find the DAS (débit d'absorption spécifique in french) for those pens
No, there aren't any that I am aware of, as the currents and forces involved are miniscule.
Excellent video, very informative!
Very well explained! Thank you very much!
That was so easy to understand. Please next explain how the cloak of invisibility work!
Does anyone know where you can purchase EMR sensors or pen tips that aren’t part of a whole stylus?
Thanks in advance
@@OrganisedByJoe did you find anything out? I only found the supernote refill. Could I just build a copper coil?
@ I didn’t sadly
I want to buy the MDO 2024. Can i get a discount?
Thank you for the interest shown :) Discount is offered only to the already existing/returning customers.