{"id":686,"date":"2010-03-03T07:48:33","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T12:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/example.org\/research-retrospective-play-solidworks"},"modified":"2010-03-03T07:48:33","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T12:48:33","slug":"research-retrospective-play-solidworks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/2010\/03\/research-retrospective-play-solidworks.html","title":{"rendered":"Research Retrospective – Play SolidWorks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you want to "Play SolidWorks<\/strong><\/em>" ?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Axis\"<\/a><\/p>\n

"Play SolidWorks<\/em>" 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.<\/p>\n

A simple mechanism is required to allow input from a game controller to drive SolidWorks using simulated mouse events and keyboard presses.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

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.  <\/p>\n

I made the following assignments for the various controls.<\/p>\n

\"Pinnacle2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Joystick 1 (on the left) is assigned as equivalent to a middle mouse button and Joystick 2 acts effectively as a left mouse button. <\/p>\n

The direction pad is coded to select one of the 4 predefined views front, right, top or isometric with a single click. <\/p>\n

Other buttons were assigned to zoom in\/out simulate LMB, RMB, ESC and Enter key hits <\/p>\n

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). <\/p>\n

Total time to configure the controller, experimenting with various combinations macro writing etc. came to about 2.5 hours. <\/p>\n

And finally \u2013 Play SolidWorks<\/p>\n

\n<\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":3030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solidworks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}