spacenav-plus

This is a fork of spacenav-plus, which is itself a fork of spacenav.

Minor modifications have been made to allow compilation on Mac OS X. It has been tested with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. A new libspnav wrapper in Python has been added, as well as a reimplementation of the official 3DconnexionClient Mac OS X SDK.

spacenavd

This is the driver daemon. It connects to the Space Mouse and sends event using the X Window System, if desired, and using a simple unix socket interface. It reads its configurations from the file /etc/spnavrc. An example config can be found in spacenavd/doc/example-spnavrc.

Sending the signals SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2 to the daemon causes it to start or stop sending X11 events.

Sending SIGHUP will cause the daemon to reload the configuration file.

For more informations, take a look at spacenavd/README.

cd spacenavd
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo cp doc/example-spnavrc /etc/spnavrc
sudo ./setup_init

spnavcfg

This is the optional graphical configuration utility for spacenavd. The required dependencies can be installed with MacPorts:

sudo port install xorg-libX11 gtk2 libGLU

You’ll also need the XQuartz Server for this to work.

cd spnavcfg
./configure
sudo make install

You will need to configure spacenavd with X11 support:

./configure --enable-x11

libspnav

This is the library used by applications that want to interact with the driver daemon. I've made some small changes. When compiling on Mac OS X, the resulting dynamic library will be built as universal/fat binary.

cd libspnav
./configure
make
sudo make install

libspnav_python

This is my simple Python Wrapper using the libspnav dynamic library, providing pretty much the same interface. An example application is included and can be tested when executing the module itself.

framework

This is my reimplementation of the official 3DconnexionClient Mac OS X Framework. It uses the original headers but reimplements the basic functionality using the libspnav library.

By default it will be installed to /Library/Frameworks. Many programs, for example Blender, will pick it up there and be able to use the spacenavd device.

For some other applications, it has to be dropped into the application bundle (you may want to backup the original one). This has been tested with Google Earth:

sudo mv /Applications/Google\ Earth\ Pro.app/Contents/Frameworks/3DconnexionClient.framework /Applications/Google\ Earth\ Pro.app/Contents/Frameworks/3DconnexionClient.framework.original
cd framework
./configure --prefix="/Applications/Google\ Earth\ Pro.app/Contents/Frameworks"
make
sudo make install

Using it in other programs

None of the programs I use regularly supports building with the spnav library on the Mac out of the box. To start, I’ve hacked support for the spnav library without using X11 into FreeCAD, which already supports spnav on Linux. The patches are in this repository, called 0001-Initialize-spacenavd-without-X11-if-not-available.patch and 0002-Added-Thread-polling-for-Spaceball-events-generating.patch in the patches/FreeCAD directory. They can be applied cleanly on top of FreeCAD commit bfaa8799edba35ae1609edb6205aaeacf37b73ff.

I’ve also modified the patch from Gert Menke to suit my setup. You can find 0001-Added-hacky-spnav-lib-support.patch in the patches/OpenSCAD directory. It can be applied cleanly on top of OpenSCAD commit 50441e85a2d0920af6a1a886b97edc001f4dc0ae.

Check out the Readme in 'sketchup_ext' for more infos about my simple proof-of-concept Sketchup 2017 libspnav extension.