Design of a pen which remembers what it writes

Abstract

Even in the current computer age, there are still many important application areas for a pen which remembers what it writes, such as early architectural design, entering letters in ideographic languages like Chinese- and Japanese; and non-letter entries like graphics, music and gestures ,and preparing a first draft of a document and concentrating on content creation where traditional tools like sketching on paper continue to be preferred by many professionals over computer-based tools. There is a growing awareness that there are often very good grounds for this preference. Hence, instead of trying to replace such traditional ways of working, it is now often considered more opportune to try and preserve the strengths of these traditional ways of working, while at the same time improving them by providing access to new media. This is one of the main objectives of the approach that we adopt here. In this project we have given the conceptual design of a digital pen which can remember what it writes based on optical tracking technology by integrating the various subsystems which are commercially available. A special type of paper is required to make this technology work. Printed on it is pattern consisting of millions of tiny dots, making it possible to identify the exact location of the pen tip. We have made a cost analysis for the fabrication of the pen based on the current market prices of the various components to be integrated and estimated the approximate dimensions of the pen.