Sanguinity

I will not lie; I want a tablet! I can’t afford a tablet. Any money I see is being saved up to transfer to a private university that wants me to shell out $30k+ a year. Yet, here I sit with an iPod Touch with a multitouch display. Why isn’t there an app for drawing small animations and uploading them to the computer to process into a video(for educational purposes)?

I contacted a friend who said he might be able to craft me an app to obtain such a small feat(recording movements of pen + sending it to an email + reading it with an interpreter on the PC); but mentioned I would have to buy a special pen to use on the display. After about an hour of searching online, I realized I would have to buy a pen from an online store for $16. I didn’t have that kind of money or time for shipping! I needed an iPod Touch pen right now.

It seems the iPod multitouch displays work by means of electrical charges. Well my pen isn’t really sending out any electricity! Everything else I stuck at the screen failed at achieving this simple task too.

First thought: find metallic pen + resistor + hearing aid battery and send out a few volts of energy from the tip. This would work but there is a catch. There is a certain surface area that must be ‘touched’ to register a touch. This means the tip of a pen is still too small.

Second thought: Static electricity would be built up in steel wool and probably pass it down from my hand to my display. So, I balled up a piece the size of a dime and rolled it across the sliding bar… success!

Sadly at this point, the time was 3am and the creative juices were not flowing.

Finally, I broke open a bic pen, pulled off a few lines of steel wool, and spiraled it across the pen, sticking the excess in the opening at the bottom. After a few tests, I knew I hit gold. I then hot glue gunned some glorious grips here and there and to keep the wool from shedding, and filled the inside with hot glue. Now I have a working iPod Touch pen for what amounts to 30 cents at a hardware store. The wool does not seem to hurt the display. I may also be using too much. I’m almost sure the same thing could be accomplished with a piece of packing foam + woven with 5-10 threads of steel wool and shoved into a pen area with 5-10 steel wool threads looping up the pen.