Acecat Digitizing Tablet — A Place to Start

Whetting your appetite with a low-price pen

The Acecat pen/digitizing tablet is a small footprint (8 x 9.5 inch), low-price ($129), entry-level stylus input device recently released by Acecad (Monterey, CA), manufacturers of a variety of tablets for high-end CAD applications. We’ll be frank right up front: the Acecat is not a breakthrough product. In fact, its most attractive feature is its price. At $129 (the PC version; the Macintosh rendition is $149), the digitizer is ideal for developers (particularly Microsoft PenWindows programmers) who are still wondering whether or not pen-based programming is a market they want to get into. The Acecat provides an inexpensive, yet reliable, means of answering this question.

The Acecat does not have an LCD display like the Wacom, CalComp, or other units we’re already used to seeing. It is an opaque, plastic tablet with an attached pen. You write on the Acecat’s 5″x5″ active drawing surface and follow the cursor around the screen. In a sense, it replaces the mouse, although it does give you greater accuracy than a mouse when working with graphics programs (floor plans, maps, and the like) and it lets you know what it is like to work with a stylus. It is noticeably better than a mouse when tracing illustrations or capturing handwritten “ink.”

The Facts

The 8×9.5 inch Acecat has an active drawing area that is 5×5 inches. This active area can be reduced in size via software; one useful reason for doing this is that you can realize faster cursor response time.

The device weighs 1.2 pounds and is built at a tilt angle of 3.7 degrees. Functionally, the Acecat emulates the Microsoft Mouse or the Summagraphics MM. The digitizer’s resolution is up to 1000 lines per inch with an accuracy of +/-0.01″ and it has a sampling rate of 150 points per second. The pen’s electromagnetic inductive technology provides proximity awareness of 0.27″.

The pen itself is a 2-button stylus; you can set it up via software to emulate a variety of mouse button clicks — right click, left click, left double click, right double click. (A 4-button option is available.) You can also define the pen to click on the pen’s button (on the side of the stylus) or on the pen’s tip (just press down on the pen). Setup software also enables you to define a variety of other operational features — tracking mode, units of measurement, active area, etc.

Setting Up the System

From the hardware side, the Acecat system is not difficult to set up, but it is a bit clumsy to do so. In a nutshell, you disconnect the keyboard plug from the PC, insert the Acecat’s plug, then re-insert your keyboard plug into a pigtail connector hanging off the Acecat cable. The other end of this cable plugs into another Acecat connector that plugs into your PC serial port. The other end of this serial connector plugs into the tablet. Finally, the pen and its cable connects to the tablet. (This configuration derives its power from the PC; an optional power adapter is also available.)

The software setup is fairly straightforward; a floppy disk contains the necessary drivers. For Windows, at the DOS prompt, you go into the Windows Setup routine and change from your current “mouse” to “other.” When prompted, you simply specify the Acecat driver. Switching back to your mouse is done by re-running Setup.

Windows 3.1 presented some differences and wasn’t quite so straightforward. However, since 3.1 is in beta and since Acecad currently doesn’t support 3.1, it wouldn’t be fair or responsible to offer reports or opinions on this. Let it suffice to say that we did use the Acecat with 3.1 and it worked just as well as it did under 3.0.

Using the System

If you’re using the Acecat as a mouse, the device is less convenient since a mouse is larger and much easier to find and grasp. However, when you start using the pen with a drawing package or pen-aware application, the advantages of a stylus become quite apparent. We tested the Acecat with a variety of Windows 3.0 application software (Drafix Windows CAD, Windows Paint, Word for Windows 2.0, and others) as well as pen-aware beta software running under a beta version of Windows 3.1 with Pen Extensions. In both environments the system worked well. At times, the pen felt slower than the mouse (we had been using a Logitech bus mouse), although we used some of the optimizing techniques described in the manual and the performance was satisfactory. Also, the cable that attached the pen to the tablet was somewhat heavy and tended to get in the way. Note that this is a problem with virtually all tethered pens, however. (An Acecad spokesman told us that within the next few months, the company would be introducing both wireless infrared and RF systems.) As with any alternative device, the pen’s characteristics took some getting used to (particularly clicking the pen) but this became less noticeable after use.

A Good Place to Start

The Acecat is a good place to begin if you’re getting started in desktop, non-mobile pen computing. It doesn’t have the LCD that allows you to write on the “surface” of your application, but then it doesn’t have the high price either. Note that if you are developing applications for environments like PenPoint or PenDOS, you’ll need to write your own drivers or talk to Acecad since the Acecat comes with drivers for Windows, Autodesk applications, and the Microsoft Mouse.

For more information, contact
Acecad
P.O. Box 431
Monterey, CA 93942-0431
408-676-4223