16-09-2009, 11:28 PM
Smart Quill You gets an idea while on the road. You note it on your palm (Provided you have a pen with you.) Forget about such old and obsolete practices. Buy smart Quill, write in air, and have it recorded! Make devices as small as possible is present trend. Computers are getting smaller than handheld. But then, there is an associated issue. Keyboards become so tiny that one requires needle-like fingers to operate them. Screens need constant cursor controls to read even a simple text. The introduction of Smart Quill has solved some of these problems. Smart Quill was invented by Lindsay Williams in 1997. It is a pen slightly larger than ordinary fountain pen, with a screen on the barrel. The sleek and stylish pen is different from other electronic pens in the market today. It contains an ink cartridge so that users can see what they write down on paper. It remembers the words written using it. The Smart Quill contains sensors that record movement by using the Earth™s gravity. User can enter information by pushing a button. Users do not have to write on any special pad in order to record what they write. Information can be entered using one™s own handwriting. Any platform, like paper, screen, tablet or even air can be used for writing. The pen records the information inserted by the user. There is also a small three-line screen to read the information stored in the pen. Users can scroll down the screen by tilting the pen. The pen is then plugged in to an electronic docking station, text data are transmitted to a desktop computer, printer, and modem or to a mobile telephone to send files electronically. Lindsay Williams is managing director of Girt on Labs Ltd in Cambridge, UK, responsible for design of new imaging devices and computers to aid Alzheimer™s. She was previously with Microsoft. It is an interesting idea, and it even comes with a security attribute. Smart Quill can be trained to recognize only the owner™s handwriting. If someone else picks your Smart Quill and tries to write with it, it will refuse to record the information. It has a computer housed within the pen which permits all features of a normal personal organize Technology used in Smart Quill for display is Kopin Corp™s cyber display technology. Cyber display is a ¼ inch diagonal LCD that uses circuitry built on a silicon wafer, then removed and mounted on glass. The displays are integrated to miniature monitors using their own backlighting, optics, ICS and packaging. Pen has accelerometers to measure hand movement in 2 or 3 planes and an on board DSP to convert hand movements to ASCII characters for pen applications. It does single character recognition and records cursive letters which can be downloaded to PC for decoding. Smart Quill works by measuring the pen™s movements and matching them to the movements that produce letters and words programmed into its memory. Consistency of handwriting, rather than neatness, is the only condition for accuracy. The pen can align text irrespective of whether it is held in left hand or right hand. This is made possible by using Micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) tilt sensors to measure tilt angle with respect to earth™s gravity. The Smart Quill microcontroller reads the angle and then maps the large screen display onto the small four line display. Smart Quill can also scroll through pages of display, by tilting it in the hand Of course a number of limitations are yet to be overcome. Only a proto has been developed and tested. The choice of words is limited presently to what characters the LCD display driver can show while upside down “ only 14 of the 26 letters of the alphabet are usable in the proto. These 14 characters were processed by anagram software to produce 900 words that used these characters. The proto Smart Quill has 4MB EEPROM memory. At a time, up to 10 pages of notes can be stored on this. The data is stored in the memory on the pen until it is uploaded to the personal computer
