RISC OS as a platform for a touchscreen interface?

Hello,

My hobby over the last few years (if you’re interested) has been to build a MIDI classical (church) organ. It goes in fits and starts, as I have the time, energy and funds. Not much has happened recently because, you know, there has been this little cough-and-cold going around. Anyway, at some point in 2021 I am going to move into the next phase of the project. I’m sorry, the there is going to be a lot of organ-geekery in the rest of this post. I can’t help myself.

The physical instrument has three keyboards, and the drawstops on either side are configured provide the interface to the virtual pipes in that configuration, once I get around to wiring them up. However, I would like to add a fourth virtual keyboard, and I’ve configure things so that it can be switched on to any of the physical keyboards. There is no space for the drawstops for this keyboard, so I propose to build a small touchscreen interface that will provide a number of buttons to act as virtual stops. This interface will also be useful for controlling the organ software – probably Hauptwerk – by means of sending MIDI messages to it.

I have been thinking of building a QT interface on top of Raspbian to provide this, but now I’ve rediscovered RISC OS again I was wondering whether I might use it instead. What sayeth the agora?

I think it is not compatible with all touchscreens so if you just buy a random one it might not work. Didn’t have a deeper look at it myself so can’t unfortunately give any more hints which device may work.

Screens based on the AR1100 (such as the Adafruit one mentioned in the linked article) definitely work. In theory any that present themselves as an absolute pointing device should work, but I’ve only tested with an AR1100.

Thank you, everyone. The pet projects I’ve got going at the moment should be finished around March or April, so I might need to go shopping soon. The inexorable pi-multiplication continues.

(if you’re interested)

Good Lord! This is really impressive.

As for touchscreen functionality, I can only say that I sometimes control my RISC OS machine on the touchscreen of my HP Envy, via RealVNC. Having said that, it doesn’t work with VirtualRPC on that same HP Envy. Why not? I’ve no idea.

The vision is mine, but I am reliant on a couple of incredibly knowledgable friends for all the clever stuff. I just bang the rocks together. And occasionally burn my fingers on the soldering iron. There has been a lot of soldering.

@ Richard H

This is a fantastic project! very cool! :)