Benefits of Spaceball?
Benefits of Spaceball?
(OP)
Some of my coworkers recommend that I get a spaceball. Its been years since I have tried one and I never could get the hang of it. One slight bump and my view goes haywire. I have recently been doing some web review meetings with my screen being the center of attention. Others involved in the meeting ask me to zoom in here or there, rotate it around, etc.... I wouldn't normally have this much trouble, but each time I selected my rotate point, it would pick some other point that I did not want. Would a spaceball help in this case? I might be willing to try it again, but I would like to hear what other users have experienced.





RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
As for your screen going haywire, you can adjust the sensitivity of the space ball to a point where it will barely move the display. Also, I have found that setting the device to "dominate axis" greatly improves its control-ability.
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
Adjust the settings to be slow at first, then as you get the hang of it, speed it up.
-Dave
NX 5.0.6.3mp7
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
...and cost over $1500.
Currently I have 3, a SpacePilot Pro in my office, a SpaceNavigator for at home and a SpaceNavigator for Notebooks when I'm on the road.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
http://www.plmworld.org/museum/
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
Also featured in that terrible flick "GI joe" as a missile aiming device...
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
-Dave
NX 5.0.6.3mp7
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
You mean like the ones shown here:
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
http://www.plmworld.org/museum/
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
The nice thing about Spaceballs is that you can 'rev them up' or 'tone them down' in regards to the speed applied to zoom, rotate and pan. So 'bumping' against it may have little effect depending on your settings.
A Spaceball will become your BFF!
ted kralovic
VisVSA, NX-6, Macbook, iPhone 3GS, among others
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
Exactly!! that thing gave me nightmares, I could crash the Unix workstation I had, pretty much on command with those knobs. The button pad was gone by then though, I only used it when I first started on CAD with Anvil 4000.
-Dave
NX 5.0.6.3mp7
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
I use a keyboard with a trackpad and never have to move either hand to pan, zoom, rotate or any other task, effortlessly. Most of my toolbars are turned off because I have keystroke shortcuts to perform 90% of what I would need icons for. I'd wager I'm more productive - in the limited sense being discussed here - than most of my coworkers, who use trackballs.
Rob Campbell, PE
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
Rob Campbell, PE
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
Zoom
Rotate about X
Rotate about Y
Rotate about Z
Pan right/left
Pan up/down
?
?
The pad with all the keys, was just that, essentially short cut keys to various functions.
The ouija board looking thing, was like your mouse, it moved the cursor on the screen, and you could pick some functions with the buttons on it, and the location on the board.
It's been a few years, so I don't recall everything they did.
-Dave
NX 5.0.6.3mp7
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
Correct me if I'm wrong John, but the one in the middle of the desk looks like a digitiser tablet. Multiple buttons on the pointer, which had a wire cross hair which you moved over the points on the tablet and button clicks activated various commands - totally customisable (some had 12 buttons, giving 12 functions per point on the tablet). Print out your own overlay, program your tablet and you had a much more productive way to draw. I used one when learning CAD on AutoCAD 9. Certainly brings back some memories!
Cheers
Steve Griffiths
If you want to make apple pie from scratch, first you must create the universe!
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
As for the button box, that was what was known as the PFK (Programm Function Keyboard) which was part of UG up until UG V10.0 which was released in 1993. Here's closer look at the one in the picture:
And here's what a Unigraphics station looked like when I started to use the software back in 1977:
We've come a long way
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
http://www.plmworld.org/museum/
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
In the next 3 years (I left the company to join the UG organization in 1980) we expanded the original system to 6 stations and added a second system (in those days you had a central CPU with serially connected terminals) which had 5 stations for a total of 11 at our facility (in the UK they had another 4 systems at various locations with something like 32 stations, making our corporation at the time the largest user of Unigraphics in the world).
As for the number of people using the system, those of us who used it on a regular basis worked one of two shifts and all told I think we had trained maybe 25 or 26 people total at the Saginaw location. Of that number, maybe 5 of us would be what you would call an Engineer (degreed or with your PE, which I was both), something like 5 NC programmers and the rest designers and draftsmen.
As you can imagine, we felt like pioneers, but it was a great experience and of course this led to my changing my career direction since, as they say, I had a chance to 'get in at ground floor' and decided to move from the user to the provider side of the equation and I've never looked back.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
http://www.plmworld.org/museum/
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
-Dave
NX 5.0.6.3mp7
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
http://www.plmworld.com/museum/
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
http://www.plmworld.org/museum/
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
-Dave
NX 5.0.6.3mp7
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
I think I still know the order of some of the commands
I believe 11-2-2-1 was trim to a curve
but when they added the ability to trim to a point
it got changed to 11-2-2-1-2
RE: Benefits of Spaceball?
http
Note that this document was from the early 80's. Also note that I created the 3D models which you see in figures 17 and 18. And these were all wireframe models, no surfaces or solids, and the 'hidden-line-removed' view in figure 17 was done by manually performing view-dependent edits of the 3D wireframe entities (BTW, I've still got the plastic part it was based on).
And to give you a better idea of what it was like working with models like this, here are before and after images of this same model (remember, this model consists of only lines, arcs and a few splines):
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
http://www.plmworld.com/museum/
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.