Introduction

The spnav module provides a Python interface to the libspnav C library, which allows you to read events from a Space Navigator 3D mouse on Linux systems. These input devices simultaneously report linear force and rotational torque applied by the user to the device, along with button events. See:

http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/spacenavigator.html

for more information about the 3D navigator.

Prerequisites

As a general prerequisite to using the spnav module, you need to install libspnav and spacenavd, available from:

http://spacenav.sourceforge.net/

Then you need to connect a supported 3D mouse to your system. Spacenavd supports USB devices with no configuration, but serial-based devices will need a /etc/spnavrc configuration file.

The spnav module requires ctypes, which is standard in Python 2.5 and later, although I have only tested spnav with Python 2.7.

Installation

The spnav module installs like any other python package. You can install the package from the unpacked source directory by running

sudo python setup.py install

Quick Test

To see if your installation is working, spnav comes with a test script in the module:

python -m spnav

This will print motion and button events from your Space Navigator to the console.

For more information and example code, see the documentation:

http://spnav.readthedocs.org/