Research Retrospective – Play SolidWorks
Do you want to "Play SolidWorks" ?
An area we've explored in the past was whether it is possible to use a game controller to drive SolidWorks. This evolved from a Research investigation to determine whether a user could effectively use 2 mice for 3D Design and Modelling.
"Play SolidWorks" was a mini-project which was allowed a maximum time of 1 day to create a viable Proof of Concept for driving SolidWorks using a game controller which connects to the PC using a standard USB port.
A simple mechanism is required to allow input from a game controller to drive SolidWorks using simulated mouse events and keyboard presses.
There are a number of software packages available that allow a user to define what happens when using a game controller to drive a Windows application. The one I used is the Pinnacle Game Profiler software obtained from https://pinnaclegameprofiler.com
The software is simple to use and recognised that the controller I am using has a combination of 12 buttons, 2 joysticks and an 8 way direction pad.
I made the following assignments for the various controls.
Joystick 1 (on the left) is assigned as equivalent to a middle mouse button and Joystick 2 acts effectively as a left mouse button.
The direction pad is coded to select one of the 4 predefined views front, right, top or isometric with a single click.
Other buttons were assigned to zoom in/out simulate LMB, RMB, ESC and Enter key hits
I also created a number of macros and setup SolidWorks to execute these from a single keystroke, this keystroke is then assigned to one of the available controller buttons ( see buttons 1-3 createBox, createCyl and createSphere).
Total time to configure the controller, experimenting with various combinations macro writing etc. came to about 2.5 hours.
And finally – Play SolidWorks