Accessing LEDs and the LCD display on a SpacePilot

Post by **jwick** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 4:04 pm

Yes, I understand. You need the GUI Sync API exposed through the COM interface. I'll bring it up next week at an engineering meeting we are having.

Michel · Post by **Michel** » Sat Oct 13, 2007 2:47 pm

OK thanks!

Post by **jwick** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 1:37 am

Hi Michel,

We'll add a Display to go along with the Sensor and Keyboard objects in the 3DxInput interface. It will allow you to set the strings on the LCD. You'll also be able to get whether the button is assigned to your app or whether it is assigned to an internal driver function.

No release date yet.

Jim
3Dx Software Development

Michel · Post by **Michel** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 3:14 am

That sounds great. Can you please post a message in this thread when the features are implemented in a release ?

BTW is the releasedate in the order of days, weeks or months??

Again thanks!

Michel

Post by **jwick** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 6:15 am

Michel wrote:BTW is the releasedate in the order of days, weeks or months??

Yes <G>

Michel · Post by **Michel** » Thu Nov 29, 2007 1:16 am

Hi Jim,

Is there some more news on the implementation of the LED control yet?

Kind regards,

Michel

Post by **jwick** » Thu Nov 29, 2007 8:23 am

Hi Michel,

No we haven't implemented a Display object (yet). We just have the LoadPreferences workaround we mentioned in this topic. If you change the file's contents and call LoadPreferences, you will get your new strings.

Sorry. That's all we have now via .NET. You can use the old API, but that's probably a lot more work for you.

Jim

lucaslf · Post by **lucaslf** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 10:26 am

Any updates? I also need to set my strings on the LCD and didn't have success.

Post by **jwick** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 1:40 pm

No updates.

Michel · Post by **Michel** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 12:55 am

It's a pity that the LCD is still not accessible in a reasonable manner. I thought this device was your 'flagship'. The lack of support stopped me from shipping it with one of our products.

Giacomo · Post by **Giacomo** » Tue Jun 30, 2009 5:36 am

Thanks Jwick for the useful information. I use the SP to drive an underwater robot and it was very important to show on the display the status of the controller.
It works perfectly as you described, using standard HID_ stuff. The refresh rate, using the unpacked mode, is about 400 ms, more than enough for text and lines.
I'm just missing the report ID for controlling the light of the LCD. Do you know which one is it?

Thanks in advance,

Giacomo

Post by **jwick** » Tue Jun 30, 2009 7:06 am

Hi Giacomo,

You might want to consider the SpacePilot Pro. Its LCD is so fast we can display full motion video on it (and of course color). Logitech has a nice SDK to interact with it that ships with the SPP.

The LCD backlight packet is: 0x10, 0x02

Jim
3Dx Software Development

Giacomo · Post by **Giacomo** » Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:53 am

Thanks, Jim. It works.
Nice the features of displaying the current time (0x04), which makes me thinking that maybe the SP has an internal font generator...? In any case, I used the Freetype-generated bitmap, already available in my project, for the fonts (with FT_RENDER_MODE_MONO, since we can't display the anti-alias with binary pixels!). Results are good in this way.

In any case, I'll look into an upgrate to the SPP.
Regards,

Giacomo