JotWatch

by Sajid Sadi & Doug Fritz in collaboration with Eben Kunz & Melody Kuna (01 Jul 2009)

JotWatch is a device designed with the singular purpose of easing quick note taking on the go. Today’s busy lifestyle demands that we juggle a variety of tasks dynamically. Note-taking has been a crucial aspect of this, allowing us to extend our working memory on demand. However, the ease-of-use and speed of physical systems has proven robust against the advances of digital technology. Even mobile devices such as the iPhone can take many seconds to simply enter note-taking mode. While devices such as voice recorders suffer from a lesser startup delay, they require either linear navigation of voice information, or transcription, both of which make access far slower than input. In comparison, writing on one’s hand allows far more efficient entry and access, though certainly it suffers from its own set of limitations (e.g. lost pens, ink smudges, and difficulty of erasure, to note a few). In designing the JotWatch, we drew on qualities of both physical and digital note-taking.

  • From the physical, we drew:
  • Start time faster than time to bring pen to “paper”
  • Resolved, nuanced writing capability
  • Ease of random access and entry
  • On-body and highly mobile (e.g. accessory)
  • And from the digital we drew ability to:
  • store robustly
  • extend drawing surfaces beyond device bounds
  • synchronize, copy, and erase
  • automatically annotate and search digital ink

The JotWatch system uses a touch screen as its primary input mode, supplemented by two physical buttons to change commands or activate the system. To use it, the user need only pull out the stylus and press the “write” button. The device wakes from sleep with 200ms and is ready for input. The delete command can allow either erasure with the stylus, or the entire frame. At any point, the user may choose to enter scroll mode and either move using the stylus, or press the scroll button again to scroll to the next screen-full of the contiguous drawing surface. Drawing can occur across visible “viewports”, though these viewports are color-coded for ease of recall.

The resistive touch screen is sampled with a dedicated controller, and the data is passed to a field programmable gate array (FPGA) by a supervisor microcontroller, which implements a energy-efficient graphics card with update rates up to 60 frames per second for smooth scrolling and drawing. The stylus causes black “ink” to be deposited on the screen, and as such the user can darken areas by going over them multiple time, or drawing more slowly, much as with an ink pen. Data is cached on random access memory while the device is in use. Once the user presses the sleep command (both buttons together) or is inactive for a time, the device automatically saves and enters sleep mode. The onboard flash can be copied to a computer using integrated Bluetooth communications.