Yes, you can retrieve the xyz position of the object in real time without running the GUI. First, you need to configure your network using the DWUSB GUI as described above, and then you need to save that configuration as the default configuration by clicking the “Save As Default” button on the configuration window of the DWUSB GUI. Then, you can close out of the DWUSB GUI, and in a terminal window, go to the directory where you put the DWUSB GUI executable and enter “./dwusb_gui --host-only”. This will run the DWUSB GUI application in a “GUI-less” mode where all it will do is calculate the positions from the raw data coming over the USB connection with the master DWUSB and then publish those positions via a UDP stream. For more information on the host-only mode of DWUSB GUI operation, please refer to section 1.6 of the DWUSB Kit Instruction Manual: http://www.ciholas.com/downloads/dwusb/DwusbKit-Instructions.pdf.
After starting up the DWUSB GUI in host-only mode, you can then subscribe to the UDP multicast stream over which the DWUSB GUI publishes the position data. As of version 0.5.0.1, the multicast IP address is locked at 239.255.76.67, but you can configure the port to be used by this data stream via the option labelled “LCM port” in the configuration window on the DWUSB GUI. At this point, you just need to create software to parse the data coming over this UDP stream. For more information on actually parsing the data, please refer to the following forum post: How to parse position data emitted by DWUSB GUI?.