hbr

Over my back fence is a little patch of greenery that I’m quite certain doesn’t look as consistently green as this any more.

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The were some heavy winds across the state a couple of weeks back – we experienced a small amount of superficial damage to the house, but the trees down the hill (leading down to Fern Glade) suffered a great deal. There are a lot of broken branches, some trees snapped in half, while some of the largest have been tipped over.

Last week I wandered down the hill with the rest of the family to take a closer look at the extent of what had happened. Unfortunately, I don’t have any ‘before’ shots to give a better context for the photos, but in part it feels like a sizable section has been clear-felled by the wind.

(Photos were taken on 20091017)

Click images for larger version.

All photos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

My previous post was mentioned over at maemo.org, with some speculation as to whether sixaxisd might work on the Nokia N900.

My initial thought was that with a small modification to sixpair, it would be possible to feed it an arbitrary BD address, so I started poking around in the source – and found that the feature is already there :D

You need the BD address of the device that you want to pair with the sixaxis – get this with hciconfig – run it (on the N900 – or whatever system) and you’ll hopefully see something like this (I don’t have an N900) :

# hciconfig
hci0:   Type: USB
        BD Address: 00:1A:80:2C:BE:D0 ACL MTU: 384:8 SCO MTU: 64:8
        DOWN
        RX bytes:87170 acl:1503 sco:0 events:62 errors:0
        TX bytes:574 acl:22 sco:0 commands:21 errors:0

Plug your sixaxis into some other machine via USB, grab (and compile) sixpair.c and run it with the BD address

wget http://www.pabr.org/sixlinux/sixpair.c
gcc sixpair.c -lusb -o sixpair
./sixpair 00:1A:80:2C:BF:D3 # use your own BD addr here

And that should be about it – unplug the sixaxis, continue with the instructions from the previous post and when you press the PS button, everything should work as if by magic.

If it does not, get more magic.  Either way, leave a comment and let me know how it goes :)

I’ve been asked about selecting a Linux distro for use on the Playstation 3 a few times recently, so I’ve put together a page summarising some of the options which has mentions of pdaXrom, Debian, Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, Fedora, RHEL and Gentoo.

It’s all based on my own knowledge and experience – if there’s something you think is worth adding (or correcting, or improving) let me know.

[Update 20091021: Expanded the entry for Gentoo based on suggestions from unsolo & cheriff, and added a link to Windows-Hosted Cell SDK which I saw mentioned by @domipheus]

sixaxisd is a little daemon that will translate sixaxis input, sent via bluetooth, into joystick and (optionally) mouse input.  I found it as part of the pdaXrom-ng distro, available here.

To set it up, grab the source here, unpack, apply the patch from here (which fixes a couple of axis mappings) and compile using make.

You need a kernel with uinput support (Device drivers -> Input device support -> Miscellaneous devices -> User level driver support – or CONFIG_INPUT_UINPUT) and appropriate bluetooth support (I use ps3_defconfig’s defaults in this area), although you don’t need any particular system bluetooth services running – we set that up ourselves.

To configure the bluetooth device using hciconfig (which is part of Debian’s bluez package), run the following commands -

hciconfig hci0 up        # bring up the interface
hciconfig hci0 lm master # set link mode to master
hciconfig hci0 piscan    # enable page and inquiry scan

And then start the daemon -

# optional -mouse param provides mouse emulation
./sixaxisd -mouse

Hit the PS button on the controller to bring it to life – all going well, there device nodes /dev/input/js0 and /dev/input/mouse0 will be created.

There’s an init script to handle the hci configuration and  all of this that may be found in the pdaXrom svn repo.

(I use my sixaxis with my PS3 – if you want to use it with a different system, you’ll need to use sixpair, available here)