Tips for Wacom One from teacher Sebastiaan Terwijn

A few tips for the use of the Wacom One pen display.

To connect the device, you need a computer with both a USB and an HDMI connection. If your computer does not have these, you will need an extra converter cable, for example HDMI to DisplayPort or mini-DisplayPort. My Thinkpad has the latter.

The Wacom One is significantly larger than a standard iPad (13 inch vs 10.2 inch), which is a big plus in case you are using this as an alternative for a blackboard.

This is not a standalone device: it is a display, it needs to be connected to a computer to work. The Wacom comes with a pen. (This in contrast to an iPad, for which an extra pen costs € 135.) The pen has no battery, and does not need charging.

You will also need software. Wacom suggests to use Bamboo, which can be downloaded for free, even if you don’t have a Wacom display. Both Apple and Microsoft also have their own software, for example Microsoft Ink. The latter works well for me, but has the disadvantage that you only have one page/whiteboard, so you cannot do proofs that take multiple pages, or flip back and forth between pages/whiteboards. Bamboo does have multiple pages, but at first it had the drawback that it was *slow*. For example, it would miss all dots/points/umlauts that I would write at normal speed.

In the Wacom Desk, you can set the pen pressure, but this does not make much difference for how fast you can write. However, you can also set the double click speed, and this *does* make a difference. This is also mentioned at the Wacom troubleshoot page, so apparently this is a common problem. Setting the double click speed to zero (off) makes a huge difference. I can now write almost at a normal speed.

In principle, you can use all drawing software, such as MS Paint, but I don’t know of any other writing applications. If you know of one that is simple, fast, and has multiple pages, please let me know.

The Openboard application for macOS/Windows/Ubuntu is nice open-source “white-board” software to use in combination with the Wacom pen display. It provides an intuitive user interface and the option to use multiple pages and switch between them fast. Under Windows, the application has a tendency to start on your main screen and not on the pen display. To make the application switch screen you can press windows key + shift + left or right arrow.

Calibration button unavailable on macOS 11.2

If you experience problems with the calibration button not being available after being asleep, there a few things you can try:

  • “Try adding the driver to your Login Items. It might help but as I mentioned before, something in your system is preventing the driver from starting properly.” Wacom Forum link
  • “If I manually deactivate and again activate the wacom tablet driver in the system preferences/security/input monitoring, then the calibration works again.” (Nadine Hauptmann)

External Wacom One pen display on Linux

The Wacom One pen display is well supported on modern Linux distributions, it seems to be supported in Ubuntu 20.04 and probably also Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Some things you may run into though…

Stylus mapping doesn’t match the Wacom One screen

This is probably trivial to someone who knows how X11 works, but for non-expert users it can be a bit tricky to figure out.

The information below is probably old and now has been integrated in the plasma system settings, if you go to System Settings -> Input Devices -> Graphic Tablet Go to the “tablet” tab and select the button “Map tablet area to screen”. In the upper left of the pop-up window, you can toggle which screen the tablet area is mapped to.

Copied from: KDE forum (I’m not sure if this is true for Gnome as well, or on Wayland systems)

$ xinput # get the IDs for all relevant pieces of my tablet.
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
[...]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen stylus id=17 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen eraser id=20 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pad pad id=21 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Finger id=22 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.1 id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
[...]
$ xrandr # get the names of my displays
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 3840 x 1200, maximum 16384 x 16384
DVI-I-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
[...]
DVI-I-3 connected 1920x1200+1920+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 546mm x 352mm
1920x1200 59.95*+
1920x1080 60.00
1680x1050 59.95
[...]
DP-1 connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 546mm x 352mm
1920x1200 59.95*+
1920x1080 60.00 59.99 59.94 50.00 60.05 60.00 50.04
1680x1050 59.95
[...]
$ xinput map-to-output 17 DVI-I-3
$ xinput map-to-output 20 DVI-I-3
$ xinput map-to-output 21 DVI-I-3
$ xinput map-to-output 22 DVI-I-3