[Soc-2010-dev] status report (fancy input devices)

[Mike Erwin]

Hi all,

week in review ---

Fixed tablet mouse spasm bug! It now acts like any other mouse. Also
filtered out the extra tablet mouse events which were filling the queue with
noise.

Refactored the GHOST_SystemCocoa event handling routines, getting ready for
more robust pen handling. The pen is not a mouse (except when it is).

Receiving SpaceNav events now, conditioning them for further use in
Blender's UI. The Mac and Windows 2.4x plugins did their own simple
conditioning, scaling *by different amounts* on each platform. I'm trying to
follow 3dconnexion's recommended interaction style. The rotations are still
a bit wonky, but there's now something on screen that sort of follows my
hand motions.

Learned the relevant API for SpaceNav handling on Windows. It's called
RawInput, and might help with the mysteriously missing mouse coalescing as
well!

Wacom developer support answered several questions I had, including some bad
news: the Intuos4 on-tablet displays are not supported on Linux at the
moment. There *was* a patch, but it used a hack that's deprecated on kernel
2.6.30 and up. This might be a Mac/Win-only feature until the Linux Wacom
Project catches up. Which is fine, since nobody on the forums seems to think
this is a good idea anyway!

Concocted a hi-fi, lo-fi, normal-fi scheme for operators to passively
request mouse/pen input at a certain fidelity. Operators default to
normal-fi, and work as they do now. This is still very early.

Read docs describing how operators and event handling works in 2.5, to make
sure I understood. I didn't. Now I do. Also read about RNA. Cool stuff!

No progress (real or attempted) on natural stroke erasing. It can wait.

Oh, and I put some stuff up on the web. There's not much yet, but it will
grow.
http://www.invisible-cow.com/blender/soc


next week ---

Debug SpaceNav input conditioning code, so that hand motions are perfectly
captured on screen. Once that's done, re-introduce this input into the
blender event system.

Activate event coalescing on/off within ghost, manually setting hi/lo/normal
fidelity. It should only grab hi-fi events *during* a stroke, not before or
after. Go easy on the event queues.

Fill web site with notes, plans, drawings, and screenshots.

Learn the Windows build process, since I need to make some changes for that
platform soon.


progress ---

I've been spending more time in the graphics lab, which is great for focus
and equipment access. IRC doesn't seem to work here, which has been a drag.
I'm creeping steadily toward the kind of tablet richness laid out in the
project proposal. It's not always clear (to me) what needs to be done next,
but there's always something ready to research or implement. Making decent
progress, one platform at a time.

Mike Erwin
musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire
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