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Xbox Controller

The Xbox Controller node captures joystick and button input from a standard Xbox controller and publishes it to the Spine network for processing by Purifier and the control system.

Why Xbox First?

The Xbox controller serves as the baseline input device during early development — it's widely available, well-documented, and provides reliable analog joystick data for testing motion scaling and tremor filtering before custom input hardware is built.

Signal flow

Xbox Controller → spine-node/input/xbox → input/raw (Spine topic)

Purifier (Kalman filter)

input/clean (Spine topic)

Kinematics Engine

Published topics

TopicTypeDescription
input/rawControlMsgRaw joystick axes and button state

ControlMsg fields

FieldTypeDescription
lx, lyfloat32Left stick X/Y (−1.0 to 1.0)
rx, ryfloat32Right stick X/Y (−1.0 to 1.0)
lt, rtfloat32Left/right trigger (0.0 to 1.0)
buttonsuint16Bitmask of pressed buttons

See also

  • Input Overview — all supported input devices
  • Purifier — filters the raw signal before it reaches the arm
  • Spine — the network layer carrying input/raw