Altium 19 - Cannot use functions with 3DxWare

[AndreaDFC]

Hi all,

I've been using for long time 3dConnexion devices on SolidWorks and I really did enjoy it.

Now i began using Altium Designer and i figured out that i can only choose few features of the program from the 3dX software's menu (mainly views and few other things) - image attached .
I would like to like to be able to use all the keys from Altium (Place Via, Place track, and so on) as i saw on some pics on the web.

Do you think this might be related to the version of Altium ? (I'm using the last one, 19.1.

I already updated 3DxWare from the website, do I need to download special plugins?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion,

Regards

[mhoopes]

Andrea,

It would be up to Altium to enable direct button functions. You can add Macros in the Buttons configuration page that correspond to shortcut keys in Altium Designer. For instance, I have a radial menu that triggers 8 different user-assigned macros that correspond to Align and Move Selection functions in AD:

align_macros.png (10.26 KiB) Viewed 3508 times

Here's the radial menu in action:

align_macros.png (10.26 KiB) Viewed 3508 times

If you like, you can add my AltiumDesigner xml file to your folder %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\3Dconnexion\3DxWare\Cfg; that will give you the macros and radial menu that I'm currently using.

One last trick: If you want to see your text in the 8-way radial menus, you need to delete or rename the following file:
C:\Program Files\3Dconnexion\3DxWare\3DxWinCore64\Cfg\Images\3DxService\User_Defined_Macros.png

[toybuilder]

Does the front/back/left/right buttons work for you guys?

I have a SpacePilot (which they recently declared "obsolete", but the driver still runs) and while the left-side function rose buttons work, the right-side ones to change the views do not seem to do anything for me. When I press to buttons to request the different side views, the LCD shows the function being requested, but AD does not actually seem to do anything except to bring up the "fit" view behavior.