Christmas Fun
Ever since I saw the idea back in the 90’s, I’ve wanted one of those digital notepads where you write on paper with an ink pen while the device captures your scribblings to a file. However, that has always been in my “that’d be nice to have” category, so I’ve never managed to get around to purchasing one. So, this year Liz gave me ACECAD’s DigiMemo 692. (She claims that I’ve been whining about getting one of these things for years so she bought one to shut me up, but I have no idea what she’s talking about.)
The overall size of the device is close to 8.5″x11″ but that includes all of the electronics, ink cartridges, flash cards, and batteries. The actual pad and writing area is roughly 6″x8″. So, I got everything setup (very easy, btw) and in no time I was making silly drawings and transferring them to my laptop.
It turns out you have to install ACECAD’s software to read their file format. It only took a few minutes to realize from their editing tools in their app that the data was in some sort of vector format. I couldn’t find a file specification online, so I dropped ACECAD an email to see if they would share that with me. To my surprise, I had a response that evening with a Word document describing the format (it was Christmas, after all). Thanks ACECAD! I whipped out my trusty ActiveState Perl and hacked together a simple file converter. Within about 30 minutes, I had some of the worst handwriting and drawings you’ve ever seen in SVG, but they were mine…very exciting.
The image below is a snapshot of one of my tests. If you click the image, you’ll see the SVG on the left and a scan of the original page on the right.
My only complaint can be seen best with the three horizontal lines on the bottom of the page. The scan shows all three lines are at the same vertical position, but that is not true in the SVG file. It turns out that the angle of the pen affects the digitizer causing it to report slightly incorrect positions. I suppose this registration issue will lessen as my notepad gets thinner. I’ll certainly be experimenting with that shortly.
For those of you who are interested or just so happen to have one of these things, I’ve included a zip file of the original DigiMemo file, a scan of the same page, the Perl script and the resulting SVG file here.
Ahhh, this is exactly the kind of silly thing that needs to be done over the holidays. And, on top of that, I may actually have found a use for my code that simplifies hand-drawn curves. 
Happy New Year to all of you!
January 31st, 2006 at 7:43 pm
HI: I read you blog. I am interested in the DigiMemo. I do
location survey’s for a land survey company. I go to homes
and measure the houses and building improvements on the
land and then draw them up for the client ( usually title company).
We take those notes and then use a cadd drawing to generate a
description of the lot to scale with the home and improvements
on the lot showing the front and side distances to the nearest property
line.
My question is:
Can I use regular paper, cut to size, containing a present sketch,
and just add the improvements. example a shed- 8×10 set off
the rear of the house to the right 3 feet from a fence and a garage
24×30 set 15 feet from house on the left side. Or any other item
drawn with distances and lenghts from the basic structure?
Also how would it work if as usual it started to rain?
I was hoping that this would cut down on paper work and transfer
of out field notes to the office.
Thanks
February 5th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Hi Roland,
All the “magic” comes from the pen and the device holding the paper, so you should be able to use anything that wouldn’t block the signal between those two.
There is a very definite coordinate system being used by the DigiMemo. It wouldn’t be difficult to transform their scale to the final units you need in your drawing.
As far as rain is concerned, the body is mostly one piece of plastic. There are panels for the batteries and the optional CF card. So, I don’t think you’d want to plunge it in a bucket of water, but it appears to be water resistant.
February 7th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
I also thought about buying one these too but the Aiptek MyNote T01 (http://www.computeruniverse.net/products/e90166460.asp) seems to be more attryctive since it can be used with A4 paper. I looked out for some converter like yours for the Aiptek but all I foud was another one for the ACECAD (http://www.etes.de/opensource/digimemo_a501_converter_linux/en/).
I guess I’ll try to write a converter myself - maybe you could also share your knowledge about the file format? Probably the formats of these tablets have a close relationship…
March 18th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Hi Tilman,
I’ve included ACECAD’s specification in the zip file link. You can download that zip file here:
http://www.kevlindev.com/blog/images/digimemo/DigiMemo.zip
May 29th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
As I am a newbie in development, any chance to convert DigiMemo files to Microsoft OneNote (or any other image format) using your code? If not, do you have at least an idea on how to do that?
thanks a lot,
Alex
May 30th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Hi Alex,
I’m not familiar with the OneNote file format, so I’m not sure what would be involved there. There are tools for rasterizing SVG files to various file formats, so that could be an option for you.
June 23rd, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Thanks for your return. I’m a Director developer and I’m reading your sample DHW file but I’m having “hard times” trying to find in what byte there is a pen state data in order to check the coordinates.
My idea is to reproduce the Digimemo document in the Director stage (I’m not if you are familiar to Director’s environment).
In sum, do you have a list of every byte in your file (ex. byte 1 = 65 (A)..byte 45 = 128 (X1), etc)?
I know it is pretty difficult to mount it and I won’t be mad if you say no but, I’d appreciate a lot to understand the logistics to create a converter file (even generating a text file with the coordinates. with that I can read the text file in Director and reproduce the code) like you did to SVG.
Well, if you think you can help in some way (I’m not familiar with binary files reading), please reply here or via email.
Thanks a lot,
Alex
July 24th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Total newbie, got my DigiMemo 692 today. i down loaded your zip file, where and what should i extract ? i am running WinXP. Thanks for your time. Ron
September 12th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Hey Ron,
You’ll need to install ActiveState Perl. After that’s running you should be able to open a command-prompt and run “DigiMemo_SVG.pl” from there.
Kevin
October 6th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Just a quick thanks for doing the work in converting these files to SVG
This makes the process soooo much simpler for the work that I do instead of going through the frankly poo software they supply.
I can now convert straight to svg and if necessary to pdf
Thankyou thankyou thankyou - if you had a donation button i would use it (it wouldn’t be much money but any is better than none)
Cheers
Chris