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  • Ellipsis is the official blog of Autodesk's Technical Evangelist Team. We will discuss all things design and manufacturing related with a focus on industries such as automotive and transportation, consumer products, industrial machinery and building product manufacturing and fabrication. We also have resident experts who will blog about specific product developments in CAD, Simulation, Industrial Design and Data Management.

    We look forward to providing you, our user community, with the most relevant and up to date developments in our industry, and hopefully with information that will assist you in doing your job better, faster, and more precisely.

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    Motion Control...
    July 11, 2008 11:24 PMby Jay Tedeschi

    It is not often that you find me singing the praises of a peripheral… but this is not just any peripheral. Most power users are already well aware of the value of the motion control devices sold by 3dConnexion. I myself have been using them and their predecessors since the original Spaceball way back in 1990. There is simply no keyboard or mouse based alternative to the smooth transitional movement between pans, zooms and rotations that can be achieved with these input devices. Well, there is a new addition to the 3DConnexion family and I have been lucky enough to have been using it now for the last couple of weeks. Behold the SpaceNavigator for Notebooks.
     
     
     
    Here it is next to it’s bigger brother, the original SpaceNavigator. Now, I know quite a few of us road warriors who had faithfully lugged around the original ‘Navigator for quite some time simply because it was an example of almost perfect simplicity. It was heavy enough to resist moving around on the desk, and had only two buttons… again… simplicity. Well, its new sibling is absolutely beautiful, with the same functional characteristics and the same feel in a much smaller package. It is almost half an inch smaller in diameter and height, and somehow they managed to cut the weight in half. Now I know I just said that the additional weight of the original ‘Navigator was desirable, however carrying it around was not. The new model has a really nice “sticky” rubber base that gives it a feeling of being almost adhered to whatever surface you are working with it on.
     
     
     
    I know, most of you gadget lovers think you want more buttons, but how often do you actually use them if you have them? I myself had the SpaceTraveler prior to the ‘Navigator, and while it had eight buttons around the circumference of the device, they were somewhat difficult to locate by touch, so myself and many others ended up programming them in pairs, which brought the button count down to 4. And if I stop and think about the ones I used more often than anything else, the count dropped to 2… one to perform a zoom fit, and the other to turn off rotations. Yep… turn off rotations. Why would I want to do that?
     

    Well, if you think about it, a fair amount of time in any modeling product these days is spent sketching, and for most of us that means working in a 2d planar view normal to the sketch plane. Suppressing device rotations allows us to continue using the ‘Navigator for panning and zooming, but will prevent us from rotating out of the plane of the sketch view. When you’re done sketching, hit the button and you are back to normal 6 axis motion control.

    Well, that’s it for today… I hope this was informative.  And for those of you already using one of these devices you got a good usability tip out of the column. Hope everyone has a great weekend and I will see you here again next week. Don’t forget to drop me some comments if you like what you read.

     

    2 Comments | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Industry News, Tips, Hardware

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