Jump to content
LegacyGT.com

mason

Members
  • Posts

    1
  • Joined

Personal Information

  • Location
    Perth, Western Australia
  • Car
    Subaru Liberty GT 05
  • Interests
    Programming, electronics, unicycling

mason's Achievements

Newbie

Newbie (1/14)

  • First Post
  • Week One Done
  • One Month Later
  • One Year In

Recent Badges

0

Reputation

  1. mason

    Car PC

    This is my first post on here and I'm midway sourcing the parts for my own car computer project. On the software front I'll be running a light Archlinux system with XBMC for media playback and I'd been looking for the perfect way to control it while driving (hitting small targets and navigating through a large media collection on a touch screen while driving would be troublesome). So I saw people on this forum or similar talking about the 3d Connexion Space Navigator and I picked one up to check out if it'd be possible to use it to control XBMC easily. No luck out of the box but I didn't need to install any kernel drivers to recognise the device. I installed the open source spacenavd daemon to detect the device correctly and raise the correct motion/button events for any applications that need it. XBMC wasn't one of those. So I wrote an application to convert those 6-axis motion movements into traditional keyboard key presses. With a bit of other goodness like variable key repeat delays depending on the intensity of the user pushing, pulling, pressing, tilting and twisting the knob. I've only had it working completely for a few hours and I've only tested it on my laptop so far (haven't taken the Space Navigator for a drive yet or used it to control a car pc running XBMC) but I think it's ready for the job or additional testing if anybody is interested. Of course you don't have to be running XBMC, you can rebind the keys to anything of your chosing. From a birds-eye POV pushing the knob forward, backward, left and right simulates keyboard up, down, left and right key presses respectively. Pushing down or pulling up on the knob is Return & BackSpace. Twisting clockwise or anti-clockwise simulates '-' & '+' keys for super fast volume control (or fine volume control, remember the configurable variable key repeat delays). Tilting doesn't do anything useful yet, I'm going to map those actions to changing workspaces (switching between XBMC and GPS navigation or other OBD tools). Thanks for listening I've got the code hosted here if anybody is interested: https://github.com/mason-larobina/spnavkbd
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use