Somewhere between 100 to 250 times a second, your tablet sends a "package" of data to your computer. This package is called a "tablet report" or just "report". The tablet driver, operating, and application may modify that data. And of course a drawing application uses that data to draw a stroke.
You can see this often in the specifications for a tablet as "report rate". Here is an example.
"RPS" means "Reports per second"
Because this is a value per second in some literature you might see the unit Hz being used. So for example instead of "200 RPS" you might see "200hz".
The exact format of the data varies dpeending on the tablet. But conceptually the report will include data like this:
The x,y position of the pen
The pressure reading. 0 = no pressure or some positive integer if there is pressure
The tilt - composed of two values: x tilt and y tilt
The button press status
The report contains other interesting things, but these are the critical ones for drawing strokes.
This site (https://patrickhlauke.github.io/touch/pen-tracker/) is sample app that shows how a web page can interact with a drawing tablet. It is also a good way to easily diagnose some tablet or pen problems.
Start using your pen on the site and you'll see some information in the upper left hand corder.
Source code for pen-tracker is here: https://github.com/patrickhlauke/touch/tree/gh-pages/pen-tracker
https://patrickhlauke.github.io/getting-touchy-presentation/ -
The brains of your tablet is in the firmware. Firmware is a special kind of computer software that is stored on your device. More from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware.
Generally speaking you can avoid thinking about firmware.
However. every now and then you may need to upgrade the firmware in your tablet.
The process of upgrading the firmware is usually very simple for a drawing tablet. You open the driver application and there's usually some button to indicate that you can upgrade the firmware or to check if there's a new firmware version available.
Updating the firmware is unlikely to damage your tablet in any fundamental way. However the firmware can change the behavior of the tablet. For example it might change how responsive the pen is because it might add or remove position smoothing.
In a general sense it's best to have the latest versions of the firmware. However I think that unless there is a specific problem you're having you should avoid upgrading the firmware.
If you are considering installing firmware to fix a problem please make sure you have contacted support first. They may have specific versions of firmware they want you to use. They may want you to try a different firmware version to test something out. And certainly they may know that certain firmware should not be installed.