I’m working on a non-commercial / hobby project on Windows and am looking for official or semi-official guidance on how to access a Spaceball 5000 USB device programmatically.
My goal is straightforward:
to read motion and button inputfrom the Spaceball and translate that into virtual joystick input (e.g. via vJoy or a similar mechanism).
What I’m looking for
Ideally, I’m hoping someone can point me to one of the following:
- An SDK (current or legacy) that supports Spaceball / SpaceMouse devices on Windows
- A documented driver API / proxy / service exposed by the 3Dconnexion Windows driver
- A C#/.NET-friendly library or NuGet package (official or community-supported)
- Or, if none of the above exist, documentation or guidance on:
- whether direct HID access is supported/recommended
- required usage pages / report formats
- whether the driver intentionally blocks exclusive or shared access
- Windows
- Application currently written in C# / .NET 10
- I’m flexible on language/runtime if another approach is significantly easier or better supported
- The Spaceball 5000 USB works correctly with the official 3Dconnexion software and demo tools
- I can enumerate the device at the OS level, but practical access to meaningful input data is unclear
- I want to make sure I’m not fighting the driver if there is an intended integration path
- This is strictly non-commercial
- Personal / hobby use only
- Not attempting to replace or interfere with official 3Dconnexion software
Thank you for your time and any guidance you can provide.
-Brian.