I’ve since updated the driver so that it treats the directional buttons on the big button controllers as the X and Y axes. This means that joydev.c will now detect the xbox360bb as a joystick driver, and so ordinary programs that use Linux’s joystick API can receive events from the controllers (and not just those that use evdev).

I also wrote a simple pygame version of Simon. This works whenever you have four joystick devices attached to your computer. You play by pressing any button on the controller. The colours match up to how the Big Button controllers are presented in xbox360bb. As soon as one person makes a mistake, the game ends. The loser is reported on the console.

These are written by James Mastros (not me). At the moment, the Linux kernel developers have not accepted any patches for supporting the device, because of code quality issues. So if you wanted to have a go with these drivers, be aware that it’s experimental in nature, may cause your computer to catch fire, or crash your system if you press the wrong combination of buttons. Take care!

For convenience, I’ve tarballed up the driver and a basic Makefile (for Debian) that will allow you to build the module without recompiling your whole kernel. It should be a simple matter of extracting the archive to /usr/src and typing ‘make’. This will build the module ‘xbox360bb.ko’, which you can insmod. You’ll need build-essential, linux-headers and linux-kbuild packages for your kernel installed.

It presents the controller has four input event devices, one for each coloured controller (green, red, blue and yellow). Each controller has 7 “normal” buttons, plus a big button on the top acts as a D-Pad and can be pushed straight down as another button.

You can test their operation with evtest. These don’t come up as regular joystick devices, which may make their use with other software difficult (ie: the program will have to be specifically designed to handle evdev to be able to use it as a controller).

The devices themselves use Consumer IR to talk to the receiver, so if you have a CIR receiver already in your computer, you can probably use the controllers without the dongle. However the dongle itself does not act as a CIR receiver with the xbox360bb module (so you couldn’t use it with a Windows Media Centre remote for a HTPC… but you could use the Big Button controllers for that).

Some ideas for these controllers, in case you had these or Buzz controllers and wanted a project idea:

• A quiz game (obviously) with customizable questions. There’s a few programs out there that already do this, and chances are they could be extended to use the Big Button controllers. It could be linked to a speech recognition software in order to allow players to verbally give their answer to a question.
• An image categorization/rating program. It could be used for up to four people to sort through images at once, and quickly give feedback.
• A Simon game.

Note: I’ve since written a second round to this post.

To do this, install [Registry Explorer][rexplrce11] on your device. If you don’t want to boot Windows (or can’t), you can use [this copy of the files][rexplrce11tbz2], which has the CAB files you’ll need to install it to your device. You can then [follow the HOWTO][sshwin20howto], then use Registry Explorer to add in the registry entries. Registry Explorer uses a GUI similar to the standard Win32 Registry Editor.

For convienience, I’ve created [a copy of my registry entries][unixreg], which you can import using the Registry Explorer software. Be aware that I store my UNIX root in `\Storage Card\unix`, due to limited internal memory. I’ve found that SSH will still try to store it’s `known_hosts` file in the `\unix` directory, so you’ll need to create that directory anyway (just leave it empty – don’t copy your UNIX root into it). The space used by the `known_hosts` file is minimal. My registry dump also uses the default username of “michael”, which you’ll need to change so it matches what you wrote in your `/etc/passwd` file.

One final thing is that ncurses apps (like irssi) seem to have some problems with the terminal type being set to ‘wince’. I’m presently working on getting a working terminfo file for Linux systems, so that they can properly handle OpenSSH on WinCE.

[sshwin20howto]: http://www.eskimo.com/%7Ewebguy/service/openssh.html
[rexplrce11tbz2]: /static/wince/rexplrce-1.1.tar.bz2
[unixreg]: /static/wince/unix.reg
[rexplrce11]: http://www.tucows.com/preview/32379

I’ve recently bought one of these devices from eBay, for a mere 70$. Bargin basement, considering the cost of an ATA is 70$, plus the cost of a phone, and that many other IP Phones sell for 300-400$, and I wasn’t willing to spend that much money on a phone.

It’s a nice gadget, it has a “straight through” RJ-45 100mbit socket, and a crossover socket, allowing you to use an existing cable for your computer for your phone as well – something ideal in offices or other situations where there is limited cabling and you want to save money on VoIP rollout.

There are five different firmwares for the device: H.323, IAX2, MGCP, Net2Phone, and SIP. By default, my unit had a SIP firmware on it, however it is painlessly switchable by downloading the firmware from Cirrus’ website, then uploading it via a web interface. It takes about 5 minutes to complete the update. Something interesting about the images is that the filesystem isn’t encrypted or encrapted at all – and you can see the raw HTML source in the file, as well as some of the strings used on the phone. Initial minipulation hasn’t really been successful, however I could be in the wrong place, or there may be a checksum on the file to prevent modified or corrupted firmware from being uploaded to the device.

A couple of issues I had was that I found the manual difficult to follow to configure the device via the handset. After I switched the device to using DHCP (it was using a static IP of 192.168.1.100 by default), it then was trivial to configure via a web interface.

Something I noticed using the original firmware that when reading out the “index” of the speed dial, that the numbers weren’t really right. So for number “98″, it would read “9 ten 8″. In v1.50 of the firmware, this issue was resolved.

I notice you can set a “phone number” to be displayed on the phone as any string you wish using the web interface, but not the handset. I actually use this functionality (it simply pops up that it’s my phone), and then it displays my local extension number. It would be good if that sort of thing was consistant.

The “Flash” button doesn’t do a “flash” (or “recall”) at all, but in fact accesses an interactive speed dial menu. Additionally, the abbreviations for some of the buttons could be better (“anscal”, “miscal”, “diacal”), and there should be some functionality to change the ringing, and dialtone, much like the Sipura ATA units do.

So, we shall see how this all goes….

The f and j keys have keyholes that are at a 90° angle in relation to the rest of the key holes, where the keys sit in. So I currently have my j, f, u and h keys all sideways. They still fit, and I guess having h and u sideways kinda compensates for the lack of little lump at the bottom
of the key. But it’s a helluva lot better than the old one.

Using the mouse feels like I’m trying to fly a plane… very large and lots of buttons. I swear it has it’s own self destruct sequence…