2011 and Spaceball

[Adam_N]

Hey, can someone tell me if I will finally be able to use my spaceball correctly with 2011 when it comes out. I have been waiting literally years to be able to use it with Alibre.......tell me that it has finally been fixed???????

 

[Adam_N]

Nope, still not fixed....... Guess this won't be.........

 

[Ralf]

Hi Adam,

Do you have the correct SpaceBall driver for your OS?

 

[sigseven]

Could you be more specific about what is working incorrectly for you? I have successfully used multiple 3D Connexion devices with Alibre, and in 2011 we now scale the pan speed according to zoom level.

 

[wathavy4]

At least my Space Navigator worked rather fine with V2011.

 

[Adam_N]

Well, I am running a spaceball 5000 USB in Win7 with the latest driver I can use. It works fantastic with Solid Edge but does not scale in Alibre. So no, I don't have the latest and greatest but it works with Edge as well as Onecnc. That's all I can go off of.

 

[sigseven]

Hmm, we don't have that particular model, though we did test that it worked with other old, discontinued models like the SpaceMouse Plus. Could you please be more specific about what problem you are experiencing? Does it not work at all or is it just the pan speed issue or something else entirely?

Also, it wasn't clear from your post, have you actually tried using it in 2011 or was that just speculation due to the lack of replies?

 

[Adam_N]

I have to correct myself. It does seem to work up to a point. I guess if you zoom out "too far", the panning stops scaling. This is not the way it works in Edge (which was the quick way I checked). In Edge you can zoom out until a part is just a dot and still the panning scales and works. But it seems that the Alibre code scales only to a certain zooming point. Perhaps it is not really an issue as the zoom scale you need to zoom out to is not a realistic point. I will use it some more before I post again.

Thanks

 

[sigseven]

Ahh, maybe the equation used is not handling the extremes as well. Glad to hear that the behavior is improved over the previous versions nonetheless. As a datapoint, which view mode do you use, perspective or orthographic?

 

[cherkey]

Just FYI....
I have an older SpaceNavigator - the one attached to the Logitech keyboard...newer drivers won't work with it. I have an older driver that still works with 32-bit Alibre but it won't work with 64-bit. I suppose it's about time to inquire about upgrading my SpaceNavigator...

 

[Adam_N]

In Perspective, I can only zoom out to a certain point so it is not an issue. In orthographic, that is where I can zoom out to a point where the pan scaling goes away. Granted, you have to zoom pretty far out in order to hit that point, but I don't have any large models to see if issue could affect use (probably not).