Old 3D CAD Mouse Gets New Lease Of Life

[Jacek Fedorynski] had an aged Magellan/SpaceMouse 3D mouse with a serial interface which made it unachievable for him to use with present day hardware and program. The trouble he confronted was two pronged – the absence of serial interfaces in the components and the deficiency of acceptable motorists for the functioning program. So he built a small expense, basic adapter to use his RS-232 Magellan/SpaceMouse with present day application.

The components expected to make the adapter was negligible. A Raspberry Pi Pico, a MAX3238 based mostly RS-232 adapter, a null modem adapter and a DB9 gender changer. Of training course, a mixture null modem – gender changer would have made things even less difficult. 4 of the GPIO pins from the Pico are mapped to the serial RX, TX, RTS and CTS pins.

On the application aspect, the code emulates a 3DConnexion SpaceMouse Compact, so it can be applied with computer software like Fusion 360, 3ds Max, SolidWorks, Inventor, Maya and lots of many others. On the host personal computer, only the conventional 3DxWare driver package deal is necessary. On the host computer system, the old Magellan/SpaceMouse 3D will seem like a modern-day SpaceMouse Compact linked in excess of USB. The only draw back to this is that the SpaceMouse Compact has just two programmable buttons, so only two of the lots of buttons on the old Magellan mouse can be mapped.

Flashing the code to the Pico is also simple utilizing the BOOTSEL manner. Hold down the BOOTSEL button when plugging in the Pico and it appears as a drive on to which you can drag a new UF2 file. Just drag-n-fall [Jacek]’s magellan.uf2 firmware and you are performed.

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