SpaceNavigator with Linux

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

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
participants (2)
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Juan M Vanegas
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Tom Goddard