VMD-L Mailing List

From: JT (jtibbitt_at_odu.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 21 2009 - 13:15:22 CDT

John,
Ok, I see. The RS232 converter is for converting between USB port and
serial mouse. This is a USB mouse. In fact, I don't think it is even
called Spaceball. Maybe the company changed the names of their mouse
lineup or something? I am using VMD 1.8.7 a62 and I thought it had
support for the SpaceNavigator. The laptop mouse is supposed to just
be a smaller version of the Desktop SpaceNavigator mouse.
Jeff

On Apr 21, 2009, at 1:53 PM, JT wrote:

> John,
> I could not find a model number anywhere, but it is called the
> 3dConnexion SpaceNavigator for Notebooks:
>
> http://www.3dconnexion.com/3dmouse/spacenavigatorfornotebooks.php
>
> It's a cool little mouse. But the website does list it as new.
> Jeff
>
>
> On Apr 21, 2009, at 1:34 PM, John Stone wrote:
>
>>
>> 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
>