Project: Anoto Reverse Engineering

Getting Anoto pens working on Linux
Status: cancelled
Runtime: 2017 - 2017
Participants: Andreas Schmid, Raphael Wimmer
Keywords: anoto, linux, reverse_engineering
Goals
Streaming tracking data from Anoto pens (in this case: Logitech io2) to applications on Linux without requiring the Anoto SDK
Status
We have tried several different approaches to get streaming data from the pens. However, documentation is poor, an several people who have worked with Anoto pens have strongly suggested that we use something else (e.g., the Neo Smartpen is quite sleek, its protocol is well documented, and some PDF files with dot patterns can be downloaded free of charge).
Background
We acquired a few old Anoto pens on eBay and would like to use them on Linux.
Publications
Resources
- Ron B. Yeh's PaperToolkit pages (last updated in 2006)
- Timothy Akujuaobi got bluetooth streaming working with Linux but provides little documentation Streaming Explanograms: Networking for Real-Time Wireless Collaboration (he notes that the SPP service needs to be called “anotostreaming” whereas Ron B. Yeh's tutorial requires the service to be called “ANOTO STREAMING”. TODO: find out whether both variants work)