How to use a Windows tablet as a drawing tablet?

Question

I have a tablet laptop running Windows 10, which supports touch and stylus input.

I'd like to use this like a drawing pad (e.g. Wacom tablet or similar) for my desktop PC.

Would this be possible, and if so, how?

Answer 1

There's an app called VirtualTablet that I believe does what you're asking. You install it on your tablet/laptop and on your desktop, and it lets you use the tablet as an input for the desktop. It won't have all of the features of a drawing tablet, and there might be some lag depending on the quality of your connection, but from my brief experience it gets the job done!

Answer 2

In Windows 10 in the Anniversary Update, there are three special apps that work with a digital pen and is meant for touchscreen laptops or tablets. The built-in apps feature post-it notes, a sketch pad, and a screen capture and annotation tool. You can use the feature to find more apps built to work with Windows Ink.

To make things work:

• Connect your tablet to your laptop/PC and open the Settings app. Go to the Devices group of settings and select the Connected devices tab. Your device should be under ‘Other devices’. Let it finish connecting.

Tip: if successfully connected, the device will be identified by name instead of its model number.

• Install drivers for your pen and tablet. Even if the devices is correctly detected, official manufacturer drivers are always a safer bet.

• With the device connected and driver updated, right-click on the Taskbar and select the ‘Show Windows Ink Workspace button’ option from the context menu. The button will then appear in the system tray. Click it to open the Windows Ink Workspace panel.

• Select which program you want to use. Sticky Notes can be used without the pen (it's actually designed for a slightly different purpose). The Sketch Pad and Screen Sketch programs are both best used with a pen and tablet.

Answer 3

So it turns out TeamViewer can do the job. TeamViewer is very similar to VNC, but it allows more functions for their free version. It is possible to run a connection over the local network (which increases speed). In the end, you can simply TeamViewer from the tablet into the desktop work like that.

Answer 4

I have a solution I use in Linux with a Thinkpad X201 Tablet that might also work for you, or at least give you some ideas. It forwards the tablet device over an ethernet crossover cable or LAN switch.

If you don't need pressure sensitivity, tilt sensitivity, or an eraser or anything like that, then this is almost trivial with VNC or RDP (which I will explain).

It is also possible to make it work with pressure, tilt, etc., but for this you will need to do a little more complicated work. I got this working perfectly around a year or two ago, but it was annoying enough that I haven't done it very often.

These instructions are assuming Unix/Linux - it certainly may be possible in Windows, so in those instances where I know something that might work I'll mention it. But at the very least it may be an inspiration for someone.

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Step one

Either connect an ethernet cable directly between computers (most any modern PC supports this, my PowerBook G4 from 2004 even supported it) or from the tablet through an intermediary switch/router on the same network as the desktop.

An ethernet connection is used instead of wireless for better throughput, lower latency, and less transmission failures to slow things down in general.

Step two

After you have your computers connected together (directly or through a LAN), set up a VNC (or RDP, if you're in Windows) server on your desktop. In linux, X11VNC will let you see your normal desktop instead of creating a whole new X display. Connect to it from a VNC/RDP client on the tablet.

At this point, if you don't need pressure sensitivity or eraser support or anything else, you're done. Otherwise, read on.

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Step three (using socat for full functionality)

Now, this is the tricky bit. It should already work as-is if you don't care about pressure, pen angle, and that sort of thing. If you do, however, most old Wacom Penabled tablet PC's used internal serial port style buses to connect their digitizers. Since they're serial ports, all we need to do is first kill off inputattach on linux (or whatever program your given OS is running to translate data from your serial port into HID events), and then forward the serial port over the network via socat.

On the tablet, first kill inputattach so the serial port is available for I/O.

Next, on the tablet, to allow access to the 'serial port' over TCP, I'd run socat like this:

sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:55660,reuseaddr FILE:/dev/ttyS0,b38400,raw

...since /dev/ttyS0 is the serial port device node. On Windows, if you can make this work to this point, you probably will see it called "COM1," unless Wacom's drivers are interfering. You may have to disable the Wacom driver and reboot for it to show up, for all I know.

This example is listening on port 55660. Root might not be needed if you change permissions on /dev/ttyS0 before running socat.

Next up, on the desktop side, I'd connect to it like so, creating a pseudoterminal (pty) file that can be read just like a local serial port:

socat pty,link=/home/username/virtualtabletnode,b38400,raw TCP:192.168.1.9:55660

Then, to start using it as a tablet device, run this on the desktop (--w8001 is the type of tablet on my system; it might be different on yours. 38400 is the baud rate. See the inputattach(1) man page).

inputattach --baud 38400 --w8001 /home/username/virtualtabletnode

It should now work with pressure and anything else your tablet supports. When you're done using it, you can kill inputattach, kill socat on the desktop, and then kill socat on the tablet.

Do this along with a view-only VNC session for the full effect.

Internal USB/I²C digitizers

Again, for internal USB digitizers, usbip is likely a better bet. For i²c devices, such as the Surface Pro 3 (apparently?), socat may still work, or something like this answer might suffice to expose a device node that socat possibly could use. I have never tried it with i²c.

Windows notes

For Windows, it may be possible to make a virtual COM port (not sure how, though) and coerce the correct tablet driver into using it. Since most windows drivers are not open source, I can't help too much there. But the basic VNC solution should work.