Space Navigator PE Driver Development Thread

[JustinNoel]

Also, I'm not using the evdev driver as I don't want a mouse. I want a 8-way controller. Left/Right/Up/Down/Push/Pull/TwistL/TwistR as discrete events. Those "gestures" would be passed to the app as key events. The key event abstraction nice since I can test with the keyboard and could switch up the hardware. I really ought tot be using a 4way directional and a knob with push and pull. The Space Pilot looked like an interesting thing I could bastardize into an all in one controller like the new iDrive controller. That and I find creatively making stuff like this work to be fun.

[nasa]

Did you happen to look at the 1st post on the link I posted earlier? While the guy who posted that was having some issues, I think it might be a starting point.

BTW: I only mentioned the evdev driver as a jump off point to using the joystick driver. Also, I would configure a joystick.conf file and place it into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory.

[JustinNoel]

I'm actually fiddling with /dev/js0 now to see what I can get out of it. There seems quite a bit of google traffic about mapping joystick to key strokes; Looks like a promising direction. Thanks for the tip. Do you have a SpaceNav device? Have you gotten the joystick interface to work at all? It may be that my device isn't working correctly or spacenavd is blocking access. I'll let you know how this pans out. Thanks again!

[JustinNoel]

Figures. The evdev joystick driver already does what I want. Here is what I added to xorg.conf (verboseness is for other who may come across this).

With this config I can give the knob a firm push/release in the general direction I want and get one event. Hold and it auto-repeats, albeit for now a slower than the keyboard. I think there may be a setting for that somewhere. The docs are a little unclear as to what the parameters to axis= really are, but this got me decent repeat without dups when simply pushing the knob naturally. I also could not get the mode=accelerated to provide keystrokes at all. So I'm not sur eif that could have gotten be better repeat speed. The scan codes used are from /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "SpaceBall"
    Driver "joystick"
    Option "Device"   "/dev/input/js0"
    Option "Path"   "/dev/input/js0"
    Option "StartMouseEnabled" "False"
    #Left/Right
    Option "MapAxis1" "mode=relative axis=5x deadzone=390 keylow=113 keyhigh=114"
    #Up/Down
    Option "MapAxis2" "mode=relative axis=5x deadzone=390 keylow=111 keyhigh=116" 
    #Enter/Escape
    Option "MapAxis3" "mode=relative axis=5x deadzone=390 keylow=9   keyhigh=36"
    #Up/Down
    Option "MapAxis4" "mode=relative axis=5x deadzone=250 keylow=111 keyhigh=116"
    #Right/Left
    Option "MapAxis5" "mode=relative axis=5x deadzone=250 keylow=114 keyhigh=113"
    #Rewind/Forward
    Option "MapAxis6" "mode=relative axis=5x deadzone=350 keylow=176 keyhigh=167"
EndSection

Then I added the SpaceBall as a Core Input Device in the ServerLayout:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "layout1"
    InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice "touchscreen"
    InputDevice "SpaceBall" "SendCoreEvents"
    Screen 0  "Screen0" 0 0
    Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

[nasa]

If I can make a couple of slight changes...

Instead of /dev/input/js0 use /dev/input/spacenavigator and add the following udev rule:

KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", SYSFS{idVendor}=="046d", SYSFS{idProduct}=="c626", MODE="0664", SYMLINK+="input/spacenavigator"

This way the above will work for someone with multiple usb joysticks and they won't have to worry about attaching to the right device...