My college friends had a fascination with dragging their fingers across my laptop touchscreen. I wasn't so keen, and thus Touchscreen Toggle (TST) was created, originally a script which toggled my touchscreen with a keyboard shortcut.
This project was my first experience working with device drivers, and uses the Windows devcon utility to disable and re-enable a device driver.
I first used devcon to determine which Human Interface Device was responsible for my touchscreen, which in my case was HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*. Using devcon disable on this HID disabled my screens touch functionality, and using devcon enable restored the touch functionality.
Toggle script
I created a small batch script which would toggle the driver based on the output from devcon status.
- If the string
Driver is running.was found, it would disable the driver. - If it instead failed to find that string, it would enable the driver.
devcon status "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*" | find /i "Driver is running.">nul
if not %errorlevel%==1 (
devcon disable "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*"
) else (
devcon enable "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*"
)
I saved the driver toggle script in C:\Windows\TST\TST.bat.
Keyboard shortcut
Having to run that script manually as an administrator was inconvenient and slow, by which time my friends would have reorganised my windows. I looked into running a script as an administrator with a keyboard shortcut and settled on using AutoHotkey.
Devcon required administrative privileges to run, so I set AutoHotkey to run and execute all scripts as administrator (Properties -> Compatibility -> Run this program as administrator).
I then created this AutoHotkey script to run it when I press the key combination Right Alt + F12.
RAlt & F12::Run, C:\Windows\TST\TST.bat
I saved this AutoHotkey script as DriverToggle.ahk.
Toast notifications
It was working perfectly, and I was able to quickly disable my touchscreen to mitigate surprise inbound fingers from disrupting my workflow.
It became a guessing game knowing when my touch screen was enabled though, so to make my script even fancier I looked into generating Windows notifications from the command line.
I found an article showing how to achieve this in PowerShell using the BurntToast module.
My PowerShell ExecutionPolicy was set to Restricted which does not allow installing any remote modules, so I had to first change my ExecutionPolicy:
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
Next, I ran Install-Module -Name BurntToast to install BurntToast.
Finally, I added my logo to C:\Windows\TST\image.png) and edited the driver toggle script to generate toast notifications with my logo as the icon using powershell New-BurntToastNotification:
devcon status "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*" | find /i "Driver is running.">nul
if not %errorlevel%==1 (
devcon disable "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*"
powershell New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Touch Screen Toggled', 'Your touch screen is now disabled.' -AppLogo image.png
) else (
devcon enable "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*"
powershell New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Touch Screen Toggled', 'Your touch screen has been enabled.' -AppLogo image.png
)
PowerShell script
I noticed that the toast notifications took a couple of seconds to appear, and instead of a black command prompt box appearing and closing immediately when running my driver toggle script, it would stay open till the toast notification appeared.
I also observed that running powershell New-BurntToastNotification from Command Prompt has the same delay, but running New-BurntToastNotification directly from PowerShell had no delay.
This led me to rewriting the driver toggle script in PowerShell:
if(devcon status "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*" | find /i "Driver is running.") {
if(devcon disable "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*" | find /i "Disable failed") {
New-BurntToastNotification -Text "Touch Screen Toggle Failed", "Failed to disable your touch screen (Am I running with administrator permissions? Is your hardware ID correct?)" -AppLogo image.png
} else {
New-BurntToastNotification -Text "Touch Screen Toggled", "Your touch screen is now disabled." -AppLogo image.png
}
} else {
if(devcon enable "HID\VEN_8086&DEV_9D3E&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_21&COL05*" | find /i "Enable failed") {
New-BurntToastNotification -Text "Touch Screen Toggle Failed", "Failed to enable your touch screen (Am I running with administrator permissions? Is your hardware ID correct?)" -AppLogo image.png
} else {
New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Touch Screen Toggled', "Your touch screen has been enabled." -AppLogo image.png
}
}
After changing my AutoHotkey script to point to this PowerShell script instead, I still observed the same delay. I concluded that the delay was PowerShell itself starting up, and my tests where PowerShell had no delay was due to PowerShell already having started up.
Touchpad Toggle!
After I did all of this with my touchscreen, I identified which HID device was behind my touchpad and wrote a script to toggle that too, because why not:
devcon status "HID\MSHW0092&COL02" | find /i "Driver is running.">nul
if not %errorlevel%==1 (
devcon disable "HID\MSHW0092&COL02"
) else (
devcon enable "HID\MSHW0092&COL02"
)
This was saved to C:\Windows\TST\TPT.bat, and the following line was appended to DriverToggle.ahk:
RAlt & F11::Run, C:\Windows\TST\TPT.bat
I decided not to do the same for my keyboard HID..
Conclusion
This was a very fun project to work on, and may be one of the most useful personal tools I have created. I've since moved to daily driving Linux, so I'm unable to check if these scripts still work, nor can I perform testing to remember specifics such as how exactly I went about finding the correct HID for my touchscreen.
The same touchscreen has unfortunately started experiencing phantom tapping so I've disabled it, and I won't be making a linux version of this solution because of that.
Top comments (0)