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Re: Code execution context

 

Hello Markus,

This is exciting news, as some of our users are also big fans of
3dconnexion products[1]

Others have looked in to what it would take in the past, but there were
some questions about the need for proprietary drivers on some platforms[2]

It sounds like this websocket interface is a new approach that doesn't
require any additional libraries for KiCad to link against?
Does the hardware use some other daemon process to bridge between the
device driver and websockets?

As you may know, KiCad uses wxWidgets as a framework, so you probably want
to plug in to the wx event loop on the main thread.
There are some guidelines on this in their docs[3].

You probably want to check out ./common/view/wx_view_controls.cpp to see
how existing input events are handled by the 2D canvases.
I guess your new code would hook in here somewhere, and provide additional
event handlers to manage the data from the 3D device.
Your communication thread should be able to post wxWidgets events to the
main thread and then we can consume them here.

By the way: although the wx docs use wxThread, I think this general concept
should work with C++ standard libraries threads just fine.
The documentation for wxEvtHandler::QueueEvent may also be useful[4]

Hope this helps!

Best,
Jon

[1] https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/4951
[2] https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg29464.html
[3]
https://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Inter-Thread_and_Inter-Process_communication#Sending_events_to_the_main_thread_-_wxWidgets_3_only
[4]
https://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.0/classwx_evt_handler.html#acffd03bf407a856166ea71ef0318b59a


On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 1:47 AM Markus Bonk <markus_bonk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
>
> I am currently investigating adding support for 3D input devices to
> pcbnew. The plan is to use a websocket interface (boost/beast) to
> communicate with the 3D device. Effectively the communication runs on an
> extra thread. Somewhere the event code will need to switch to executing on
> the main thread.
>
>
>
> One way of achieving this on say win32 might be to add functors to a queue
> post a message to a message window handler in the main thread which empties
> the queue and invokes the functor.
>
>
>
> Is such a mechanism already in place in KiCAD? What is the KiCAD
> recommended solution to the issue?
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
> -Markus
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *Markus Bonk*
> Senior Software Engineer
>
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