sigma7 SDK Python Bindings

This repo provides Python bindings for the Force Dimension SDK which is used to communicate with sigma.7. The bindings are generated using pybind11. As I do not have the sigma.7, I have not been able to test the bindings on real hardware. Proceed with your own risk and caution when you test on the hardware.

The bindings for only the Standard SDK from the Haptics SDK are provided here. The Expert SDK bindings are not yet provided.

Prerequisites

The following are required to build the bindings:

• Force Dimension SDK: Can be downloaded from their website: https://www.forcedimension.com/software/sdk. For ease of use, extract the SDk to the sigmaSDK folder in the root of this repo.
• pybind11: Can be installed using pip install pybind11
• Build tools such as cmake and make, and a C++ compiler.

Build

This has been tested on Ubuntu 22.04.

Testing the SDK Location and Linking against the SDK

The sigma_compile_test folder is a simple test program to verify the correct location of the SDK. It uses the hello_world.cpp example from the Haptic SDK Documentation.

• Change the variable sigmaSDKDir in the sigma_compile_test/CMakeLists.txt file to the location of the SDK.

• Run the following commands inside the sigma_compile_test folder:

  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake ..
  make

• If everything is correct, the program should compile without any errors.

Building the Python Bindings

If the test program compiles without any errors, you can proceed to build the Python bindings:

• Change the varibales sigmaSDKDir and pybin11Path in the CMakeLists.txt file to the location of the SDK and location of pybind11 respectively.

• Run the following commands inside the root folder:

  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake ..
  make

• If everything is correct, the bindings should compile without any errors.

Testing/Using the Bindings

The bindings will be compiled to the build/ folder by default. Two example scripts from the Haptic SDK documentation are translated to Python and are available to test the bindings. The scripts are:

• hello_world.py
• single_device.py

Known Issues/Bugs

As I've not yet been able to properly pass the char function arguments in the binding, the DeviceID argument must be a non-negative integer between 0 and 9. This is in contrast to the C++ examples in the SDK/header files where the DeviceID is a char and the default value is -1. Pybind11 sees -1 and double digit integers as a multi-character string instead of a character.