Hi all, Clearpath Robotics and other users of ROS are working with PlayStation Sixaxis bluetooth pads to teleoperate robotic systems, presently using the qtsixa/sixad utilities. We're contemplating a switch to BlueZ 5 for this functionality, but tests are showing problematic behaviour when the controllers go out of range or lose power (battery, etc). The behaviour which we are observing is that the controller goes out of range, and the BlueZ-created dev node continues persisting the last known joystick state--- an obvious safety problem. We would much prefer any (or some combination of) the following to be the behaviour under this circumstance: - Publish nothing, such that a processing selecting on a joystick fd simply times out rather than receiving bogus data. - Remove the dev node. - Publish a known "safe state", such as all buttons unpressed, and axes in the positions they were in upon pairing. - Publish connection status/quality through some side channel. I don't know how universal this is, but at least for the sixaxis, there's a known scheme for detecting disconnections, which you can see in sixad: https://github.com/falkTX/qtsixa/blob/master/sixad/sixad-sixaxis.cpp#L202 In the short term, we can continue using sixad, but for various reasons we'd like to be able to migrate to BlueZ 5, and this is a blocking issue on that path. We don't have a lot of resources to commit to this, but I would be willing to invest some effort given buy-in and design guidance. Let me know your thoughts, Mike -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-bluetooth" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
