Peripheral Assignment

Drawing Tablets

A drawing tablet is a device that can be used instead of a mouse, used mostly for graphic design. Most tablets have a USB interface. Bluetooth can connect tablets without the use of wires, and for older computers a serial interface is needed to connect a drawing tablet. A drawing tablet has two parts, the drawing surface, and the utensil needed to draw. Drawing tablets can come with a pen, stylus or puck. Also, many models of drawing tablets come with a penholder and others come with a cordless mouse.
Tablets come in different sizes. It really depends on what the tablet will be used for to choose the appropriate size, but the biggest size isn’t necessarily the best. Some artists prefer a smaller tablet so they do not have to move their arm as much, while others prefer a large surface because it feels more naturally. The cost of drawing tablets increases with size of them.
Some of the pens for a drawing tablet require batteries while others do not. The pens containing batteries are heavier, and the battery will need to be replaced. Also, some pens will have a connecter, so they are not lost, but some come lose from the tablet. Some pens need to be programmed to erase, while others have an eraser on them that does a delete in one quick motion. Tablets are also pressure sensitive. This means when you press harder, the line you’ve just drawn will be thicker; it can also control the colour of the line. The first drawing tablets worked by having a grid of wires underneath the surface of the tablet, the grid had horizontal and vertical coordinates and using a magnetic signal, the coordinates would be sent to the computer monitor, creating the image that was drawn on the tablet. The first drawing tablet was the RAND tablet, which was also known as the Grafacon. This was introduced to on the marketplace in the year of 1964.

This is our External Computer Hardware Research Assignment. AKA. Peripheral Assignment. For this assignment we had to research an optional computer component. In case you couldn't tell from the beginning of this blog I chose to research drawing tablets. This turned out to be really annoying to research, because when making the chart almost every single drawing tablet I found to include was from the same company. But once again, the main thing I learned from this assignment was the brilliance of Google. I figured out that clicking the sponsored links was the easiest way to get information about buying stuff... who knew? I also remembered how to use the pen and line tool in flash when drawing the diagram of a drawing tablet. My personal opinion of the assignment was that it was boring. I dislike researching, especially when the information is a lot harder to find than you would think.