VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 21 2009 - 12:34:34 CDT

Jeff,
  Which model of Spaceball are you trying out? The RS232 spaceball
driver compiled into VMD is something I wrote myself and it only supports
the older Spaceball 2003/3003 models. If you have a Spaceball 4000FLX or
one of the other newer models it probably won't work in that case.
As for which device node to use for the serial port, that depends on what
USB/RS232 converter device you're using. I would expect the docs for the
RS232 converter device to talk about this. If you have one of the later
model Spaceball 4000xxx USB devices, my RS232 driver probably won't work.
Let me know if you need more help with this.

Cheers,
  John

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 01:30:04PM -0400, JT wrote:
> Hi. I'm trying to hook up a 3DConnexion Spaceball mouse for use with
> VMD. The mouse works with other 3D programs, so I'm pretty sure it
> was installed correctly. The VMD Userguide says that the
> VMDSPACEBALLPORT environment variable must set to the Unix device name
> of the serial port to which the Spaceball is attached, and that also
> the permissions must be set to allow the VMD user to open the device
> for reading and writing. How do I find out which port the mouse is
> using? I tried /dev/ttys0 (just to see what happens), and set the
> permissions as suggested. Upon startup, VMD recognizes the mouse and
> understands which port I set, but it does not work. I see many ports
> in /dev, but nothing that sticks out as a 3DConnexion enabled port.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
>
> 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078