JTAG (pun intended) is a small program written in C which reads input from a Wacom SD-510C tablet, pictured below, and displays the animated dripping image using the functionality provided by the SDL and SDL_gfx libraries. This project was inspired by the Graffiti Research Lab's awesome Laser Tag project. Since my laptop's video card and webcam aren't exactly too great, I wound up with a ridiculously low frame rate and trouble tracking the laser when running their software. Since I don't exactly have money lying around for a better laptop and webcam, I dropped $40 (including shipping from CA...) on an old Wacom tablet and wrote my own software.

I'm pretty pleased with the results, as my software runs very well on my machine (minus the known bug list), plus I find it a lot easier to draw using the tablet rather than with a laser pointer. While nowhere near as cool as doodling on a building with a laser pointer, I think it still gets the job done.

Wacom SD-510C

Yeah...that's masking tape. I taped off the 4:3 screen ratio, and use the remaining sliver on the right side for color selection. Check out the diagram included with the source code if you're curious about how colors are distributed along that strip.

Source code:
Below is some hacked out source...maybe I'll clean it up with some bugfixes. I might wind up making some specialized hardware to interface with the Wacom tablet to avoid the need for a laptop altogether. In this case, I probably won't bother updating this.

jtag-0.1_20081128.tar.bz2

Note: I have a really unstable version of this that I ran at ArtAwake -- it allows you to change brush sizes and drip frequencys from within the program. If anyone's really interested, I can dig it out and email it to you, or post it here.

Demo Videos:
Here's a couple videos and pictures of JTAG in action.