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I had told you before, quite a few days ago, that I was anxiously waiting for the arrival of a demo unit of 3DConnexion’s new SpacePilot PRO. Well, it arrived a couple of days after I wrote that post, and I’ve been playing with it ever since, trying to find out if it’s all I was hoping it would be. Unfortunately for me, I ran into some trouble and so it was that this particular hardware review almost wasn’t. But I’ll tell you all about that in just a few more minutes.

First, let me tell you about the very first thing that caught my eye ever since the moment I saw the unit at that meeting in Orlando.  Well, it’s actually the second thing, because the first one really was the fact that the whole unit seems to be more ergonomic and comfortable to use, a real relief, actually, for those of us that have suffered or still suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyway, let me tell you a bit about the LCD workflow assistant. This is a small LCD full-color screen located at the top of the unit, and it displays visual feedback about the function keys, navigation settings keys, and other information, such as email, rss feeds, important tasks, and calendar. It certainly is attractive, but is it also useful? Well, let’s see… My favorite, of course, is the applet that provides information about the function keys, quick navigation keys and navigation settings in the SpacePilot PRO. It is very convenient to get information on what commands your different keys are mapping to, and the LCD color screen is also easier on the eyes than the little screen on the old SpacePilot.

I’m not so thrilled about the Microsoft Outlook email applet, though. The way it is right now, it allows you to see your incoming email, but you can only see email that has arrived to your Inbox, not to any other folders, not even to those under the Inbox folder, and you also still need to have Outlook opened in the background for it to work. The same applies to the Outlook Calendar and Outlook Tasks applets.  The RSS feeds, however, has proven useful to me in the last few days. Basically, it allows you to receive short excerpts of rss feeds of your choice (the news, a blog, Twitter search), find one that interests you, move to it with the arrows, click OK, and read it on your computer screen. You don’t need to have anything opened in the background for this one to work. I’ve been using it to keep track of the development of the Swine flu in my country of birth, Mexico, while working on something else in my computer. Really useful!  

I know, it may seem like this little LCD screen is more bells and whistles, but the really exciting thing about it is that it doesn’t necessarily end here, just with these few default applets. Actually, since it is based on open software architecture, it is possible to create custom made applets for many different purposes. While at the meeting, we were talking about the possibility of having, for instance, SolidWorks tips and tricks delivered to that little screen, or perhaps a small video tutorial, or even a SolidJott applet, why not? The possibilities are endless!

The 3DConnexion cap, the heart of this 3D mouse, works pretty much the same way as it did in the SpacePilot, but, I don’t know if it is my imagination or what, I think it is somehow more sensitive in the SpacePilot PRO than it was before. Perhaps it’s only that the whole unit feels a lot more comfortable on the wrist? Could be.

The Navigation Settings Keys are not so different from what was already available in the SpacePilot PRO. They basically allow you to restrict navigation, to avoid, for instance, rotating the part (turn rotation off) or zooming and panning (turn translations off).  These can prove very useful depending on what kind of work you’re doing; perhaps you just need to rotate the part to select entities from it, for instance. In this case, turning translations off would do the trick.

The quick navigation keys have also been revamped when compared to the old SpacePilot. Now you have five keys, of which three of them enable you to select six standard views of the model (top, front, right, left, bottom and back) by means of a short and long press mode. You push for a short time, you get the top view, you push for a longer time and you get the bottom view. You also have two isometric views, and a button that rotates the model in increments of 90 degrees around an axis normal to the screen.  The Fit button is still there, you help you fit the model to the screen, in case you get lost while zooming or panning.

And now let me tell you about those Function Keys. These keys are by default mapped to ten different SolidWorks commands, relevant to the kind of document you open. There are three default configurations of keys, one for parts, one for assemblies and one for drawings, but you can create your own configurations by mapping the buttons. This is probably what excited me the most about the SpacePilot PRO, and sadly, the one thing about it that gave me tons of trouble just to get it to work properly. You see, according to the description of the product, and what I saw during the meeting in Orlando, I was expecting to be able to use these five little buttons to program the SpacePilot PRO by mapping different commands to each button and then saving my particular arrangement as a configuration for later use. It is an exciting thing not only because now I have more buttons available (these ones also work with short and long press like the quick navigation keys), but also because I can save an endless number of different configurations of keys, and even map other keys in the SpacePilot PRO, and program my own macros for each configuration, as well, by using the custom functions option available through the 3DConnexion Control Panel under the button configuration tab.

That sounds really good, only when I tried mapping buttons and saving configurations of keys to use with SolidWorks, my configurations kept changing back to the default values, or I would see strange behavior, such as seeing in the LCD display that the command Offset Faces was mapped to button 4 in the SpacePilot, then pushing button 4 and having Shell execute instead. At some point, I managed to save quite a few configurations for the SpacePilot PRO to use with SolidWorks, but I could only change from one to the other by first closing SolidWorks, then opening it again and selecting the new configuration from the 3DConnexion control panel before opening any document.  

After struggling for quite some time, I decided to seek for advice from their tech support. I can’t complain because they were quick to answer my requests, gave me great attention, and plenty of ideas on what could be wrong and how to fix it.  I was told that perhaps a file was corrupted, in particular because I had a SpacePilot for this machine before and I had installed on top of that, without uninstalling the other one first. Then they advised me to uninstall the software that accompanies the SpacePilot PRO, clean the registries and other tidbits of files left behind, and do a new, clean installation of it. I did just that… several times, actually… With each uninstall/install cycle, I was finding more and more little tidbits that had been left behind, scattered in different places of my hard drive and that could very well be the reason for my problems. I was also finding more quirky behavior from the SpacePilot PRO. At some point during this process, the LCD stopped working and would only display an image of the SpacePilot PRO, even when the buttons were still working. I was beginning to think that I had received the one demo unit that happened to be defective, but it was then that I learned that Jeff Mirisola had experienced similar issues with his demo unit, as well. He helped me out in making sure that I was really doing a clean installation this time around and thanks to him the SpacePilot PRO worked again and I was able to map the function keys one more time.  Still, I continue to obtain strange results when trying to save configurations of function keys.

I’m still trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. I tried the SpacePilot PRO with Photoshop and didn’t have these problems at all when creating configurations for function keys. I’ve been told by 3DConnexion’s tech support that the SpacePilot PRO has been extensively tested and has been observed to work properly with SolidWorks, still they realize that it’s brand new and don’t deny the possibility of some issue arising; that’s why they really appreciate the feedback. Personally, I wonder about the possibility of a little bug in the software that may affect the way the 3D mouse interacts with SolidWorks, specially because it didn’t just happened to me. If that’s the case, I’m sure it can be fixed with a new version of the driver or a patch or some kind.

Even with all my struggles to make those function keys work, I still consider this new SpacePilot PRO an awesome 3D mouse, powerful, comfortable like nothing else, and full of potential. My only other huge disappointment: it won’t work with PhotoView 360! How come? Well, maybe soon… In the meantime, I’ll continue exploring this unit, just in case there’s something else, something really great  I still haven’t found out about it.

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