tslib consists of the library libts and tools that help you calibrate and use it in your environment. There's a short introductory presentation from 2017.

If you have problems, questions, ideas or suggestions, please contact us by writing an email to [email protected], which is our mailing list.

Visit the tslib website for an overview of the project.

• setup and configure tslib
• filter modules
• the libts library
• building tslib
• hardware support

tslib runs on various hardware architectures and operating systems, including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD or Android/Linux. See building tslib for details. Apart from building the latest tarball release, running ./configure, make and make install, tslib is available from distributors like Arch Linux / Arch Linux ARM, Buildroot, Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE and their package management.

You only need the variables in case the following defaults don't fit:

TSLIB_TSDEVICE          Touchscreen device file name.
                        Default (ts_setup):     /dev/input/ts
                                                /dev/input/touchscreen
                                                /dev/input/event0
                                                /dev/touchscreen/ucb1x00

TSLIB_CALIBFILE         Calibration file.
                        Default:                ${sysconfdir}/pointercal

TSLIB_CONFFILE          Config file.
                        Default:                ${sysconfdir}/ts.conf

TSLIB_PLUGINDIR         Plugin directory.
                        Default:                ${datadir}/plugins

TSLIB_CONSOLEDEVICE     Console device.
                        Default:                /dev/tty

TSLIB_FBDEVICE          Framebuffer device.
                        Default:                /dev/fb0

This is just an example /etc/ts.conf file. Touch samples flow from top to bottom. Each line specifies one module and it's parameters. Modules are processed in order. Use one module_raw that accesses your device, followed by any combination of filter modules.

module_raw input
module median depth=3
module dejitter delta=100
module linear

see the section below for available filters and their parameters.

With this configuration file, we end up with the following data flow through the library:

driver --> raw read --> median  --> dejitter --> linear --> application (using ts_read_mt())
           module       module      module       module

Calibration is done by the linear plugin, which uses it's own config file /etc/pointercal. Don't edit this file manually. It is created by the ts_calibrate program:

# ts_calibrate

The calibration procedure simply requires you to touch the cross on screen, where is appears, as accurate as possible.

You may quickly test the touch behaviour that results from the configured filters, using ts_test_mt:

# ts_test_mt

If you're using X.org graphical X server, things should be very easy. Install tslib and xf86-input-tslib, reboot, and you should instantly have your ts.conf filters running, without configuring anything else yourself.

This is a generic solution for Linux - using tslib's included userspace input evdev driver ts_uinput. You need to set the TSLIB_TSDEVICE environment variable to point to your touchscreen device. But don't use /dev/input/eventX; the event numbers are not persistent. Use such a udev rule:

SUBSYSTEM=="input", KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", ATTRS{name}=="mydrivername", SYMLINK+="input/ts", TAG+="systemd"

or find another way of creating a /dev/input/ts symlink. You'd need that for any application using your device. Now you can use ts_uinput:

# ts_uinput -d -v

-d makes the program return and run as a daemon in the background. -v makes it print the new /dev/input/eventX device node before returning.

You can use evdev drivers now. For Qt5 for example you'd probably set something like this:

QT_QPA_GENERIC_PLUGINS=evdevtouch:/dev/input/eventX
QT_QPA_EVDEV_TOUCHSCREEN_PARAMETERS=/dev/input/eventX:rotate=0

For X11 you'd probably edit your xorg.conf Section "InputDevice" for your touchscreen to have

Option "Device" "/dev/input/eventX"

For Wayland, you'd make libinput use the new /dev/input/eventX and so on. Please see your system's documentation on how to use a specific evdev input device.

Remember to set your environment and configuration for ts_uinput, just like you did for ts_calibrate or ts_test_mt.

Let's recap the data flow here:

driver --> raw read --> filter --> filter(s) --> ts_uinput (ts_read_mt())  --> libevdev read  --> GUI app
           module       module     module(s)     daemon                        e.g. in libinput

Again, /dev/input/event numbers are not persistent. In order to know in advance, what enumerated input device file is created by ts_uinput, you can, among other thing:

• use the included tools/ts_uinput_start.sh script that starts ts_uinput -d -v and creates the symlink /dev/input/ts_uinput for you, or

• if you're using udev and systemd, create the following udev rule, for example /etc/udev/rules.d/98-touchscreen.rules:

  SUBSYSTEM=="input", KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", ATTRS{name}=="ts_uinput", SYMLINK+="input/ts_uinput"
  

  in case you have to use non-standard paths, create a file containing the environment or tslib, like /etc/ts.env

  TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/ts
  TSLIB_CALIBFILE=/etc/pointercal
  TSLIB_CONFFILE=/etc/ts.conf
  TSLIB_PLUGINDIR=/usr/lib/ts
  TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb0
  

  and create a systemd service file, like /usr/lib/systemd/system/ts_uinput.service

  [Unit]
  Description=touchscreen input
  Wants=dev-input-ts_raw.device
  After=dev-input-ts_raw.device
  
  [Service]
  Type=oneshot
  EnvironmentFile=/etc/ts.env
  ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'exec /usr/bin/ts_uinput &> /var/log/ts_uinput.log'
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target
  

  and

  #systemctl enable ts_uinput
  

  will enable it permanently.

There is no tool that we know of that reads tslib samples and uses the Windows touch injection API, for example (yet).

Linear scaling - calibration - module, primerily used for conversion of touch screen co-ordinates to screen co-ordinates. It applies the corrections as recorded and saved by the ts_calibrate tool. It's the only module that reads a configuration file.

Parameters:

• xyswap

  interchange the X and Y co-ordinates -- no longer used or needed if the linear calibration utility ts_calibrate is used.

• pressure_offset

  offset applied to the pressure value

• pressure_mul

  factor to multiply the pressure value with

• pressure_div

  value to divide the pressure value by

The median filter reduces noise in the samples' coordinate values. It is able to filter undesired single large jumps in the signal. For some theory, see Wikipedia

Parameters:

• depth

  Number of samples to apply the median filter to

Pressure threshold filter. Given a release is always pressure 0 and a press is always >= 1, this discards samples below / above the specified pressure threshold.

Parameters:

• pmin

  Minimum pressure value for a sample to be valid.

• pmax

  Maximum pressure value for a sample to be valid.

Infinite impulse response filter. This is a smoothing filter to remove low-level noise. There is a trade-off between noise removal (smoothing) and responsiveness. The parameters N and D specify the level of smoothing in the form of a fraction (N/D).

Wikipedia has some theory.

Parameters:

• N

  numerator of the smoothing fraction

• D

  denominator of the smoothing fraction

Removes jitter on the X and Y co-ordinates. This is achieved by applying a weighted smoothing filter. The latest samples have most weight; earlier samples have less weight. This allows to achieve 1:1 input->output rate. See Wikipedia for some theory.

Parameters:

• delta

  Squared distance between two samples ((X2-X1)^2 + (Y2-Y1)^2) that defines the 'quick motion' threshold. If the pen moves quick, it is not feasible to smooth pen motion, besides quick motion is not precise anyway; so if quick motion is detected the module just discards the backlog and simply copies input to output.

Simple debounce mechanism that drops input events for the specified time after a touch gesture stopped. Wikipedia has more theory.

Parameters:

• drop_threshold

  drop events up to this number of milliseconds after the last release event.

Skip nhead samples after press and ntail samples before release. This should help if for the device the first or last samples are unreliable.

Parameters:

• nhead

  Number of events to drop after pressure

• ntail

  Number of events to drop before release

Variance filter. Tries to do it's best in order to filter out random noise coming from touchscreen ADC's. This is achieved by limiting the sample movement speed to some value (e.g. the pen is not supposed to move quicker than some threshold).

There is no multitouch support for this filter (yet). ts_read_mt() will limit your input to one slot when this filter is used. Try using the median filter instead.

Parameters:

• delta

  Set the squared distance in touchscreen units between previous and current pen position (e.g. (X2-X1)^2 + (Y2-Y1)^2). This defines the criteria for determining whenever two samples are 'near' or 'far' to each other.

  Now if the distance between previous and current sample is 'far', the sample is marked as 'potential noise'. This doesn't mean yet that it will be discarded; if the next reading will be close to it, this will be considered just a regular 'quick motion' event, and it will sneak to the next layer. Also, if the sample after the 'potential noise' is 'far' from both previously discussed samples, this is also considered a 'quick motion' event and the sample sneaks into the output stream.

The following example setup

       |--------|       |-----|      |--------------|
x ---> | median | ----> | IIR | ---> |              | ---> x'
       |--------|    -> |-----|      |    screen    |
                    |                |  transform   |
                    |                | (calibrate)  |
       |--------|   |   |-----|      |              |
y ---> | median | ----> | IIR | ---> |              | ---> y'
       |--------|   |-> |-----|      |--------------|
                    |
                    |
             |----------|
p ---------> | debounce | -------------------------------> p'
             |----------|

would be achieved by the following ts.conf:

module_raw input
module debounce drop_threshold=40
module median depth=5
module iir N=6 D=10
module linear

while you are free to play with the parameter values.

The graphical tools support rotating the screen, see ts_calibrate --help or the man pages for the details. Note that this only rotates the framebuffer output. Rotating the input samples is a different task that has to be done by the linear filter module (re-calibrating or re-loading with different parameters).

The API is documented in our man pages in the doc directory. Check out our tests directory for examples how to use it.

ts_libversion()
ts_open()
ts_config()
ts_setup()
ts_close()
ts_reconfig()
ts_option()
ts_fd()
ts_load_module()
ts_read()
ts_read_raw()
ts_read_mt()
ts_read_raw_mt()
int (*ts_error_fn)(const char *fmt, va_list ap)
int (*ts_open_restricted)(const char *path, int flags, void *user_data)
void (*ts_close_restricted)(int fd, void *user_data)

To use the library from C or C++, include the following preprocessor directive in your source files:

#include <tslib.h>

To link with with library, specify -lts as an argument to the linker.

On UNIX systems you can use pkg-config to automatically select the appropriate compiler and linker switches for libts. The PKG_CHECK_MODULES m4 macro may be used to automatically set the appropriate Makefile variables:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES([TSLIB], [tslib >= 1.10],,
  AC_MSG_ERROR([libts 1.10 or newer not found.])
)

If you want to support tslib < 1.2, while still support multitouch and all recent versions of tslib, you'd do something like this:

#include <tslib.h>

#ifndef TSLIB_VERSION_MT
        /* ts_read() as before (due to old tslib) */
#else
        /* new ts_setup() and ret = ts_read_mt() */
        if (ret == -ENOSYS)
                /* ts_read() as before (due to user config) */
#endif

This is a complete example program, similar to ts_print_mt.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#include <tslib.h>

#define SLOTS 5
#define SAMPLES 1

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    struct tsdev *ts;
    char *tsdevice = NULL;
    struct ts_sample_mt **samp_mt = NULL;
    struct input_absinfo slot;
    int ret, i, j;

    ts = ts_setup(tsdevice, 0);
    if (!ts) {
            perror("ts_setup");
            return -1;
    }

    samp_mt = malloc(SAMPLES * sizeof(struct ts_sample_mt *));
    if (!samp_mt) {
            ts_close(ts);
            return -ENOMEM;
    }
    for (i = 0; i < SAMPLES; i++) {
            samp_mt[i] = calloc(SLOTS, sizeof(struct ts_sample_mt));
            if (!samp_mt[i]) {
                    free(samp_mt);
                    ts_close(ts);
                    return -ENOMEM;
            }
    }

    while (1) {
            ret = ts_read_mt(ts, samp_mt, SLOTS, SAMPLES);
            if (ret < 0) {
                    perror("ts_read_mt");
                    ts_close(ts);
                    exit(1);
            }

            for (j = 0; j < ret; j++) {
            	for (i = 0; i < SLOTS; i++) {
		#ifdef TSLIB_MT_VALID
			if (!(samp_mt[j][i].valid & TSLIB_MT_VALID)
				continue;
		#else
			if (samp_mt[j][i].valid < 1)
				continue;
		#endif

			printf("%ld.%06ld: (slot %d) %6d %6d %6d\n",
			       samp_mt[j][i].tv.tv_sec,
			       samp_mt[j][i].tv.tv_usec,
			       samp_mt[j][i].slot,
			       samp_mt[j][i].x,
			       samp_mt[j][i].y,
			       samp_mt[j][i].pressure);
                    }
            }
    }

    ts_close(ts);
}

If you know how many slots your device can handle, you could avoid malloc:

struct ts_sample_mt TouchScreenSamples[SAMPLES][SLOTS];

struct ts_sample_mt (*pTouchScreenSamples)[SLOTS] = TouchScreenSamples;
struct ts_sample_mt *ts_samp[SAMPLES];
for (i = 0; i < SAMPLES; i++)
        ts_samp[i] = pTouchScreenSamples[i];

and call ts_read_mt() like so

ts_read_mt(ts, ts_samp, SLOTS, SAMPLES);

Wikipedia has background information.

Usually, and every time until now, libts does not break the ABI and your application can continue using libts after upgrading. Specifically this is indicated by the libts library version's major number, which should always stay the same. According to our versioning scheme, the major number is incremented only if we break backwards compatibility. The second or third minor version will increase with releases. In the following example

libts.so -> libts.so.0.7.0
libts.so.0 -> libts.so.0.7.0
libts.so.0.7.0

use libts.so for using tslib unconditionally and libts.so.0 to make sure your current application never breaks.

If a release includes changes like added features, the second number is incremented and the third is set to zero. If a release includes mostly just bugfixes, only the third number is incremented.

A tslib tarball version number doesn't tell you anything about it's backwards compatibility.

• libc (with libdl only when building dynamically linked)
• libsdl2-dev (only when using --with-sdl2 for SDL2 graphical applications)

• libevdev - access wrapper for event device access, uinput too ("Linux API")
• libinput - handle input devices for Wayland (uses libevdev)
• xf86-input-evdev - evdev plugin for X (uses libevdev)

This lists the programs for the every day use of tslib, facing the outside world. For testing purposes there are tools like ts_test_mt too.

• ts_calibrate - graphical calibration tool. Configures the linear filter module.
• ts_uinput - userspace evdev driver for the tslib-filtered samples.

• xf86-input-tslib - direct tslib input driver for X11
• qtslib - direct Qt5 tslib input plugin
• enlightenment - A Window Manager (direct support in framebuffer mode, X11 via xf86-input-tslib)
• DirectFB - Graphics library on top of framebuffer

struct tslib_module_info
struct tslib_vars
struct tslib_ops
tslib_parse_vars(struct tslib_module_info *,const struct tslib_vars *, int, const char *);

tslib modules (filter or driver/raw module) in the plugins directory need to implement mod_init(). If the module takes parameters, it has to declare a const struct tslib_vars and pass that, it's lengths and the params string that is passed to mod_init to tslib_parse_vars() during mod_init().

Furthermore a const struct tslib_ops has to be declared, with it's members pointing to the module's implementation of module-operations like read_mt that get called in the chain of filters.

libts can be built to fit your needs. Use the configure script to enable only the modules you need. By default, libts is built as a shared library, with each module being a shared library object itself. You can, however, configure tslib to build libts statically linked, and the needed modules compiled inside of libts. Here's an example for this:

./configure --enable-static --disable-shared --enable-input=static --enable-linear=static --enable-iir=static

This should result in a libts.a of roughly 50 kilobytes, ready for using calibration (linear filter) and the infinite impulse response filter in ts.conf.

In case you cannot draw to the framebuffer directly, there is an experimental implentation of the necessary graphical tools using SDL2. They are more portable but require more resources to run. To use them, make sure you have SDL2 and the development headers installed and use ./configure --with-sdl2.

tslib is cross-platform; you should be able to build it on a large variety of operating systems.

This is the hardware independent core part: libts and all filter modules as shared libraries, build on the following operating systems and probably more.

• GNU / Linux
• Android / Linux
• FreeBSD
• GNU / Hurd
• Haiku
• Windows
• Mac OS X

This makes the thing usable in the real world because it accesses your device. See hardware support for the currently possible configuration for your platform.

The libts default configuration currently has the following input modules disabled:

• cy8mrln-palmpre
• dmc_dus3000
• galax

Please note that this list may grow over time. If you rely on a particular input plugin, you should enable it explicitely. Even though on Linux you should only need input, building all supported modules for your platform should look like so:

• GNU / Linux - all (most importantly input)
  • ./configure.ac --enable-cy8mrln-palmpre --enable-dmc_dus3000 --enable-galax
• Android / Linux - all (most importantly input)
  • ./configure.ac --enable-cy8mrln-palmpre --enable-dmc_dus3000 --enable-galax
• FreeBSD - almost all (most importantly input)
  • ./configure.ac --disable-waveshare
• GNU / Hurd - some, see hardware support
  • ./configure.ac --disable-input --disable-waveshare
• Haiku - some, see hardware support
  • ./configure.ac --disable-input --disable-touchkit --disable-waveshare
• Windows - no tslib module for the Windows touchscreen API (yet)
  • ./configure.ac --with-sdl2 --disable-ucb1x00 --disable-corgi --disable-collie --disable-h3600 --disable-mk712 --disable-arctic2 --disable-tatung --disable-dmc --disable-input --disable-touchkit --disable-waveshare

Writing your own plugin is quite easy, in case an existing one doesn't fit.

• GNU / Linux - all
• Android / Linux - all (?)
• FreeBSD - all (?)
• GNU / Hurd - ts_print_mt, ts_print, ts_print_raw, ts_finddev
• Haiku - ts_print_mt, ts_print, ts_print_raw, ts_finddev
• Windows - ts_print.exe, ts_print_raw.exe ts_print_mt.exe ts_test_mt.exe ts_calibrate.exe

For GNU/Linux all architectures are very well covered, thanks to Debian or Arch Linux or others.

If you're lucky, you'll find some unofficial testing builds for Windows or other platforms here.

Please help porting missing programs!

For mostly historical reasons, tslib includes device specific module_raw userspace drivers. The ts.conf man page has details on the available module_raw drivers; not all of them are listed in the default etc/ts.conf config file. Those are to be considered workarounds and may get disabled in the default configuration in the future. If you use one of those, please ./configure --enable-... it explicitely.

It is strongly recommended to have a real device driver for your system and use a generic access module_raw of tslib. For Linux (evdev) this is called input.