gamepad

Gamepad is a gem I wrote to get the values of my xbox1 controller in a ruby program (to control my Parrot AR drone). I plan to use it for piloting my Parrot AR drone and other robotics stuff. So far I've only used it to control my ping-pong robot though. It wasn't designed for use in game libraries, but it might work for you.

Right now only (original) xbox1 controllers are supported. I plan to add PS1 controller support when I have time, and support for other controllers if I ever get any (and also have time).

This is my first adventure into programming a Ruby c extention, and into c itself, so this lib is probably not safe to use in production, but then who needs to interface with an xbox1 controller in production…

Gamepad is a very early dev release made for me to play around with the xbox gamepad from Ruby, the API will likely change. Pull requests welcome.

Installation

On a mac:

	brew install libusbx

On another platform YMMV. Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

	gem 'gamepad'

And then execute:

	$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

	$ gem install gamepad

Usage

Plug your xbox controller into your computer using an xbox -> USB adaptor (they're pretty cheap, I got mine off ebay) then run:

require 'gamepad'

gamepad = GameController::Xbox1.new
gamepad.on_changed do |values|
	puts "Changed to #{values.inspect}"
end

See examples/.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

TODO

• auto-detect xbox controllers being added/removed
• Handle more than one controller type
• display_xbox_status(libusb_device_handle *handle) crashes when the xbox controller is not connected
• ps1 controller
• Maybe use the async API of libusbx
• Signal handling is kind of odd

Author

• Will Jessop, @will_j, will@willj.net