[Bf-committers] supporting 6Dof devices on blender.

[Jean-Luc Peurière]

A feature request that pops frequently is support for 6DOF devices  
(generally those from 3Dconnexion).

Unfortunately the license agreement they request for using their SDK  
is not and cannot be make GPL compatible.

I just received my own spacenavigator, and confirmed that it is just  
another regular HID device with all the standard hooks.

So adding application side drivers HID support in blender  (ghost)  
would allow us to bypass the SDK and hence use the devices. Added  
bonus is that we can support any proper USB device like joystick,  
gamepads and so on.

On Os X, HID support is built in, i don't know the situation on other  
OS. In any case there is some libraries (libUSB, libHID) which seem  
reasonably portables.

So who would be interest to tackle with me this, and add HID support  
on all 3 major OS we support (Windows, linux, Os X) ? once we support  
those, adding support for the other unices should be straightforward.

Linux support could use xinput too, but unfortunately this is far  
from portable to other OSes, so the HID road is the most promising i  
think

-- 
JLuc (lukep)

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