[Chimera-users] SpaceNavigator with Linux

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Juan,

  3dconnexion, the makers of the Space Navigator device, have made it a 
real pain to support on their devices on multiple platforms.  Chimera 
provides Mac and Windows support for the device using the completely 
different 3dconnexion SDKs for those platforms.  Linux is a third 
entirely different SDK and is particularly bad according to the spacenav 
sourceforge project (redhat and suse only with Motif gui only).  Using 
the sourceforge spacenav sdk seems sensible but I won't have time to 
work on that for at least a few months.  If you'd like to try writing 
some code what you need is to be able to provide the latest button and 
motion events in Python.  Chimera polls for this info on Windows and Mac 
(bad design but working directly from callbacks causes multi-threading 
errors, should be fixed by queing the events with Chimera some day).  
See the Chimera SpaceNavigator Python code to understand how the polling 
works:

    chimera/share/SpaceNavigator/__init__.py

Probably would not be too hard after a Python wrapper is made for the 
sourceforge spacenav library.

    Tom


Juan M Vanegas wrote:
>  Hi,
>
> I just purchased a space navigator and would like very much to get it 
> working with Chimera on linux. I don't know if you are aware of the 
> spacenav project (http://spacenav.sourceforge.net/), it is a GPL 
> alternative to the proprietary drivers. I would be willing to help with 
> some of the coding/testing, I know a little bit of programming and I 
> have the device. Thanks for the great work with Chimera.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Juan
>
>