
I freed your old unsupported SpaceMouse/Pilot/Explorer (Win)
3dconnexion sells 3D mice of various kind. They all share one feature: they never break. My SpacePilot is from 2007 and it just keeps working. The rubber might get sticky, so some solvent and it's gone for good, and no stickyness anymore.
Being the market a niche one, the products cost a lot, and to force new purchases the company cut support for pre-2013 models (ok that's not yesterday, but keep reading).
Not only! to "bring the best user experience to the users" I found out 3dconnexion was active introducing suport for the latest drivers into various software, at the cost of dropping support for older devices!
See PR in FreeCAD
Yes supporting old devices costs money. How much? ALMOST NOTHING, because guess what? taking USB pakets from old devices and just changing the IDs here and minor things here and there makes very old and unsuported devices recognised as (less old but still) supported devices: this small bridge (5 Euro investment) converts old devices into a Spacemouse Wireless, still supported. Latest drivers are possible!
But why being dependent on them?
Someone reimplemented from scratch the Mac drivers for old devices, and now I ported their project to Windows (via Opus 5.5).
Enjoy telemetry-free, open source, working drivers on Windows for all the unsupported USB 3D mice.
These drivers have less predefined bindings for known packages. For example the official ones allow to bind a key to "show front, left, right" in Fusion, which has no keyboard shortcut for that. This kind of bindings are not yet offered, propose PRs if you want them.
There's always the option of remapping old devices into a Spacemouse Wireless to use official drivers, obviously.