cutiepi-rotation-scripts

A set of scripts and services to manage display rotation on the CutiePi tablet.

It interacts with the CutiePi gyroscope over iio-sensor-proxy to detect the orientation of the device, and it manipulates the display rotation using some simple xrandr and xinput scripting.

Installation

1. Ensure that the iio-sensor-proxy package is installed:

$ sudo apt install iio-sensor-proxy

2. Clone the repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/BlackLight/cutiepi-rotation-scripts
$ cd cutiepi-rotation-scripts

3. Simply add the bin folder to your PATH, or copy/symlink its content somewhere in your PATH

4. If you want to run the autorotate script as a startup service:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
$ cp systemd/autorotate.service ~/.config/systemd/user
$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
# Start the service
$ systemctl --user start autorotate
# Enable the service at startup
$ systemctl --user enable autorotate

Usage

As shown in the previous example, the autorotate script can be enabled as a startup service and it can automatically handle the rotation of the display by polling gyroscope sensor data.

There are also two auxiliary scripts (screen-rotate-left and screen-rotate-right) that can be programmatically called in your scripts or launched from the panel to manually force display orientation.

Notes

The autorotate script disables the HDMI input when started. The reason is that the calculation of the coordinate transformation matrices for the touchpad is much more complex when working with extended displays. If your tablet is physically connected to a screen, however, the chances that you may want to leverage auto-rotation are quite low anyway, so a workaround could be a simple script that turns on the HDMI input and stops the autorotate service when an HDMI input is plugged, and restarts it when it's unplugged.

If a strong use case exists for handling auto-rotation on extended displays, feel free to open an issue.