Robotic Xbox 360 wired controller fun

paulfo — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:51:35 GMT

I'm playing with my robots again. This time I want voice control. I discovered that my Bluetooth headset doesn't deliver the quality required by the Windows Vista Speech Recognition function, so I was looking for another headset to use. I can already drive my robots around using a wired Xbox 360 controller - it plugs into a PC using normal USB. Then I rediscovered the Xbox 360 headsets I have, and wondered if the controller driver for the PC would support the headset - esp. as the headset has that handy mute button - and what do you know! It does.

So now I can drive my Robots around using the triggers/thumb stick (dependent on robot function) and also issue it voice commands :-)

Next step. I have a OQO Model e2 UMPC running Vista. It is pretty CPU challenged with only a 1.6GHz Via cpu BUT if I can get it to run the voice and Xbox controller MSRS application then I can have remote robot control :-)

If you are new to MSRS (Microsoft Robotics Studio) you'll not understand that an application consists of orchestrating many software services. Typically each service controls or communicates with a piece of hardware. Due to this services design there is no need to have all the services that make up the whole application running from the same PC. So, my robots with built in PCs can run the direct hardware control and my UMPC can run the voice and Xbox control services passing the commands received across the network to the orchestration application running on the robots. All good fun.

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Robotic Xbox 360 wired controller fun