tuhi - a daemon to support Wacom SmartPad devices

For the last few weeks, Benjamin Tissoires and I have been working on a new project: Tuhi [1], a daemon to connect to and download data from Wacom SmartPad devices like the Bamboo Spark, Bamboo Slate and, eventually, the Bamboo Folio and the Intuos Pro Paper devices. These devices are not traditional graphics tablets plugged into a computer but rather smart notepads where the user's offline drawing is saved as stroke data in vector format and later synchronised with the host computer over Bluetooth. There it can be converted to SVG, integrated into the applications, etc. Wacom's application for this is Inkspace.

There is no official Linux support for these devices. Benjamin and I started looking at the protocol dumps last year and, luckily, they're not completely indecipherable and reverse-engineering them was relatively straightforward. Now it is a few weeks later and we have something that is usable (if a bit rough) and provides the foundation for supporting these devices properly on the Linux desktop. The repository is available on github at https://github.com/tuhiproject/tuhi/.

The main core is a DBus session daemon written in Python. That daemon connects to the devices and exposes them over a custom DBus API. That API is relatively simple, it supports the methods to search for devices, pair devices, listen for data from devices and finally to fetch the data. It has some basic extras built in like temporary storage of the drawing data so they survive daemon restarts. But otherwise it's a three-way mapper from the Bluez device, the serial controller we talk to on the device and the Tuhi DBus API presented to the clients. One such client is the little commandline tool that comes with tuhi: tuhi-kete [2]. Here's a short example:

$> ./tools/tuhi-kete.py
Tuhi shell control
tuhi> search on
INFO: Pairable device: E2:43:03:67:0E:01 - Bamboo Spark
tuhi> pair E2:43:03:67:0E:01
INFO: E2:43:03:67:0E:01 - Bamboo Spark: Press button on device now
INFO: E2:43:03:67:0E:01 - Bamboo Spark: Pairing successful
tuhi> listen E2:43:03:67:0E:01
INFO: E2:43:03:67:0E:01 - Bamboo Spark: drawings available: 1516853586, 1516859506, [...]
tuhi> list
E2:43:03:67:0E:01 - Bamboo Spark
tuhi> info E2:43:03:67:0E:01
E2:43:03:67:0E:01 - Bamboo Spark
 Available drawings:
  * 1516853586: drawn on the 2018-01-25 at 14:13
  * 1516859506: drawn on the 2018-01-25 at 15:51
  * 1516860008: drawn on the 2018-01-25 at 16:00
  * 1517189792: drawn on the 2018-01-29 at 11:36
tuhi> fetch E2:43:03:67:0E:01 1516853586
INFO: Bamboo Spark: saved file "Bamboo Spark-2018-01-25-14-13.svg"

I won't go into the details because most should be obvious and this is purely a debugging client, not a client we expect real users to use. Plus, everything is still changing quite quickly at this point.

The next step is to get a proper GUI application working. As usual with any GUI-related matter, we'd really appreciate some help :)

The project is young and relying on reverse-engineered protocols means there are still a few rough edges. Right now, the Bamboo Spark and Slate are supported because we have access to those. The Folio should work, it looks like it's a re-packaged Slate. Intuos Pro Paper support is still pending, we don't have access to a device at this point. If you're interested in testing or helping out, come on over to the github site and get started!

[1] tuhi: Maori for "writing, script"
[2] kete: Maori for "kit"