🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug20.173052.8036@u.washington.edu> merritt@u.washington.edu writes:
>
>In article <12715@lupine.ncd.com>, keg@hansen1.ncd.com (Ken Garnett) writes:
>|> I'm looking for manufacturers of input devices commonly known as
>"Dial Boxes"
>|> or "Knob Boxes".  These are units composed of multiple rheostat-like knobs
>|> which each can generate ranges of integer values.
>|> 
>|> If anyone has information on who manufactures these devices, I'd appreciate
>|> any pointers to them.  Detailed information like model names/numbers would
>|> be helpful, too, if you've got that handy...
>|> 
>	The ones I have are made by Spectragraphics / 9707 Waples St /
>San Diego 92121 / (619)450-0611.  They are re-sold by DEC for use with
>DEC workstations, but should be usable anywhere since they just plug in to
>a normal serial port.
>
>	I am posting this rather than simply mailing a response because
>it raises a gripe I have with a lack of flexibility in AVS as regards to
>interactive input.  It would be awfully nice if there were some generalized
>input port to all the 3-D viewers (particularly "render geometry") which
>would take ascii input and rotate/scale/translate/etc.  That way one
>could actually _use_ the dial box (it's not supported on the AVS version
>I have), or bind function keys to give pure axial rotations, discrete scaling
>increments, or whatever.  I.e., whatever bit of code is polling the mouse
>buttons and pointer motion could equally well pay attention to input on the
>ascii port.
>
>	Any hope of seeing such an approach in a future version? Or anyone
>have any bright ideas about how to approximate it given the tools that are
>there right now?  I realize that one could create modules which essentially
>take over the maintenance of the transformation matrices upstream of the
>geometry viewer, but this seems like a wasteful duplication of code and
>likely of compute time also.
>
>					Ethan A Merritt
>					merritt@u.washington.edu

each dial vendor has device dependent driver sw. stellar supported the
DIGIT dialbox through its dialbox mgr which allowed you to attach the 
dials to widgets/parameters in avs. the dial driver is buried in the avs
kernel so providing support for all dial devices would be none trivial.
the only way a standard dial interface could be developed is to have all 
input devices ie dials, spaceballs, powergloves etc rolled into X then
basically all you have to do is watch for events and handle them accord-
ingly. i don't know when and if X will cover this.

regards,
james, peters@convex.com

BTW the DATA/Dials_Control module available at the avs international center
was a product of the new dialbox interface introduced in avs2 which forced you
to bind via the dialbox manager. if you want to roll your own dialbox inter-
face i would start with this module and add your dial driver. you will be
pretty limited to just translations instead of ability to bind to any widget
through the dialbox mgr.