VMD-L Mailing List

From: Trollmann, Marius (marius.trollmann_at_fau.de)
Date: Wed Nov 29 2023 - 03:23:23 CST

Dear VMD-Community,

Based on some older threads about this topic, I installed VMD 1.9.1 on
my machine and prepared the vmdsensors file as suggested in the online
documentation:

device phantomtracker vrpntracker://localhost/Phantom
scale 10
rot left 0 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 0
device phantombuttons vrpnbuttons://localhost/Phantom
device phantomfeedback vrpnfeedback://localhost/Phantom

Finally,I put this file into the VMD home directory ("C:\Program Files
(x86)\University of Illinois\VMD\.vmdsensors").

That worked! VMD was able to detect the VRPN server in the Tool window
and I could interact with a MD simulation (e.g. Poly-alanin from the IMD
tutorial).
However, I still observe a minor drawback: The pre-compiled version of
VMD 1.9.1 for Windows has not the option to read/load PDB files. Is it
possible to re-install a plugin or something to achieve this? Moreover,
I would like to ask why more recent versions of VMD were not able to
detect the VRPN server? Are they not compiled with VRPN? If so, is there
a possibility to obtain such a compilation from the developer team or
the community?

At least, I hope this thread can help other people with the same device
and the same problems. I would also like to thank all the developers for
this very cool open source project!

All the best,
Marius