Using Spaceball devices with VMD

Beginning with version 1.8.7, VMD includes much broader support for consumer level Spaceball-like six-degree-of-freedom input devices such as the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator.

For the older Spaceball 2003/3003/4000 devices using serial ports, one can use either the vendor-provided commercial driver or the built-in VMD serial driver. The VMD built-in driver is activated by setting the VMDSPACEBALLPORT environment variable on Linux/Unix/MacOS X. The built-in driver interface is documented in the VMD User's Guide. The built-in serial driver is based on John Stone's LibSBall library.

For the newer 3DConnexion devices like the SpacePilot, SpaceNavigator, etc, VMD uses the commercial drivers provided by 3DConnexion, and the devices are automatically detected and supported on all of the VMD platforms. Another option besides the commercial drivers, which is particularly useful on Linux distributions that 3DConnexion doesn't support well, one can also use the open-source "spacenavd" driver, which acts as a drop-in replacement for the commercial driver.

VMD now includes a "spaceball" command, which implements the following capabilities: 

spaceball mode 

valid modes are: 
normal   -- Full 6DOF motion control of the scene.
            In Perspective display projection mode, forces applied to the
            ball/puck are reflected in the orientation and position of
            the molecule.  In Orthographic display projection mode, 
            forward/back translations of the ball/puck result in 
            scaling rather than translation since translation in Z is
            not easily visible in orthographic mode.

maxaxis  -- Limited DOF motion control. 
            Only translate/rotate on the axis with the largest force input.
            This mode is best used when one only wants to alter the 
            position or orientation of the molecule in one axis at a time.

scale    -- Scale the molecule/scene

animate  -- Use the Spaceball as a jog/shuttle control for
            trajectory playback. 

tracker  -- Use the console Spaceball as a VMD tracker, much
            as one would use a haptic device.  
            This is done by adding two lines to your ~/.vmdsensors 
            file as below:
              device SpaceballTracker     sballtracker://local/vmdlocal
              device SpaceballButtons     sballbuttons://local/vmdlocal

            With that done, you can open the Graphics->Tools menu,
            and either manually create a grab tool, and add the 
            spaceball tracker as the position device, and the spaceball
            buttons as the button device, etc.
            I'm still working on the button controls here, but you
            can try it out and see what you think presently.
 
user     -- This emits events for use by Tcl scripts via callbacks, 
            an example script is shown below:

  proc do_spaceball_client { args } {
    global vmd_spaceball
    puts "Spaceball event: $vmd_spaceball"
  }

  trace add variable vmd_spaceball write do_spaceball_client

  spaceball mode user

There are also two commands that configure the 'feel' of
the device:
  The 'spaceball sensitivity' command sets the scaling factors
  that translate the user-applied forces on the device to corresponding
  rotation/translations in VMD.  The default sensitivity is "1.0", with
  my internal implementation having lots of magic speed factors that I 
  determined by trial and error.  This sensitivity value is a global 
  sensitivity scaling factor.  Internally, I have many others, but I'll
  only expose them as user commands if people really feel the need to 
  tweak this in more detail.  For starters we'll see how a single scaling
  factor works out.  Heres' an example:
    spaceball sensitivity 1.0
    

  The 'spaceball nullregion' command sets the force magnitude below
  which VMD simply ignores the input and does act on it.  If you have
  a device that likes to wander by itself
  or you find that the slightest touch already causes motion on the display,
  you can set this value higher.  The default value I'm using presently
  is 16, which should be quite reasonable.  Here's an example:
    spaceball nullregion 16