Multiple SpaceNavigators

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gertius
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Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 6:10 am

Multiple SpaceNavigators

Post by gertius »

Hi!
Is it somehow possible to use multiple (two) SpaceNavigators with the rundaemon and the Magellan SDK on one Linux-Machine?
If not, would it be possible on another OS?

Cheers!
Christian
jwick
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Post by jwick »

It is possible on Windows and the Mac.

Our Unix/Linux engineers will have to respond with Unix/Linux details.
crobl
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Post by crobl »

Hi gertius,

no, this is not possible with 3dxsrv on Unix/Linux. Only one instance of the driver is allowed to run on a machine.
The driver checks, if there is another process 3dxsrv or xdriver running or if there is a window, that belongs to the driver and quits/doesn't start if this is true.

Regards,

Christian Robl
3Dconnexion
Absum
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Re: Multiple SpaceNavigators

Post by Absum »

gertius wrote:Hi!
Is it somehow possible to use multiple (two) SpaceNavigators with the rundaemon and the Magellan SDK on one Linux-Machine?
If not, would it be possible on another OS?

Cheers!
Christian
The opensource spacenav driver could with some coding handle multiple devices. If i remeber correctly it already has some preparation done for it.
nuclear
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Post by nuclear »

Hi, it would be very easy to modify the free spacenavd driver to handle multiple HID event sources, but some thought must be given to what would you do with them.

I guess the only sane use case, would be to have 2 apps, each get events from a different device. This cannot work in magellan/3dxsrv compatibility mode, but there's nothing to stop us from adding such functionality to the alternative UNIX socket interface of spacenavd/libspnav. But that would mean that you can't use this scheme with any of the magellan based 3d connexion plugins for, say, maya or whatever.

One way that multiple devices could work with the original magellan-compatible API, would be to run two daemons, and add code to the daemon to advertise itself only on a single X screen of the current display (for a 2-screen setup for instance). Then any application running on say :0.0 would talk to one of the daemons, while any app running on :0.1 would talk to the other one.

Anyhow... to the original poster: contact me (nuclear@siggraph.org) with details of what you want to do. If you volunteer to test multi-device support (I only have one space navigator), I can probably hack something together.
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