VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 14 2002 - 10:16:58 CDT

Hi Kenneth, VMD-L,
  I'm CCing this note to Russell Taylor at UNC, he might have other
suggestions regarding VRPN on your SGI or might have a more definitive
answer regarding VRPN support for the SGI version of Ghost.

I know that people have had the phantom server working on SGIs some
time ago, but I've never seen one personally. As well, I believe that
Sensable no longer supports the SGI platform anymore as of the most recent
version of Ghost that just came out. You could interface trackers to VMD
by writing your own tracker code and compiling VMD from source. There are
a number of ways to do this.

At present the VRPN interface is the only
tracker code in VMD that implements haptic feedback capability, so it would
probably be easiest to update VRPN to better support your SGI than it would
be to start from scratch and write your own Ghost driver directly. Of
course, another option is just to drive your phantom from a Windows PC
using the Windows version of VRPN. I believe there is another group in
Canada that had this problem, but I never heard what they decided to do
to resolve it, it could be that they just got the PC version of Ghost
and went that route.

Most recently Sensable has released Ghost 4.0, and
I believe they are now going to make it available on Linux. I don't think
VRPN has been updated for Ghost 4.0 yet, but we just got our copy of Ghost
4.0 the other day and will probably take a look at it soon. One of our
haptic devices is being repaired so we'll probably wait until we get it
back before messing with all of that. Let us know if you need help
going the Windows route or if you find out anything new on the SGI
side of things.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 09:41:13AM -0400, Kenneth Ayers wrote:
> Just wondering if anyone out there has been able to get the Phantom
> tracker to work with vmd on sgi. The problem for me is that the phantom
> server for vrpn doesn't want to compile. The issue seems to be that the
> phantom server was written for windows only. Before I go through the
> trouble of trying to fix this I thought I would ask if anyone has solved
> the problem allready. Is there another way to interface a tracker to
> vmd without using vrpn?
>
> -Ken 

-- 
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