From: James Peters <peters@convex.COM>
Subject: Re: Dial/Knob Boxes?
Originator: peters@mikey.convex.com
Keywords: CAD/CAM 3-D-Graphics Visualization
Reply-To: peters@convex.COM (James Peters)
Organization: CONVEX Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx., USA
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 21:23:06 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
              Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
              not necessarily those of CONVEX.

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.
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.avs