It is a sort of user space driver, as the wiki says:
“Because this package can be used independently of ROS by people wishing to use a PS3 joystick in linux, I am providing a direct link to the driver here. In order to run this python file, you will have to have the following system dependencies installed: python, bluez, python-bluez, joystick, libusb-dev.”

Clearly it is a temporary solution. Again from the wiki:
“With maturing support for the PS3 joystick in BlueZ and the Linux kernel, we hope that most people will no longer need this package unless they want to use the gyroscope and accelerometer axes”.

I do not know if the documentation and code there may be helpful for you, but for sure people in the project will be happy with the improvements in the device support.

The Wii gamepad needs a driver, I used wminput.

Those are areas where a Gnome utility would really be useful.

By the way, joydev is completely deprecated now, and evdev should be used instead. I see no point in supporting joydev these days. Evdev is a superset of the deprecated joydev API.

evdev has three event types relative to gamepads:
– EV_KEY (key presses)
– EV_ABS (absolute position, for example “33 on a range [0-100]”
– EV_REL (relative movement, for example “+33 on the X axis”

The Dualshock 3 controller has:
– 2 analog sticks
– 2 analog triggers (L2/R2)
– 10 pressure-sensitive buttons (Up, Down, Left, Right, L1, R1, Triangle, Circle, Cross, Square)
– 5 standard buttons (Start, Select, “PS”, L3, R3)
– 1 6-axis accelerometer
– 1 vibration motor

* The analog sticks should be handled quite well (ABS_X, ABS_Y, ABS_HAT0X, ABS_HAT0Y).
* The analog triggers are more complicated, but I guess I would map them on ABS_HAT1Y and ABS_HAT2Y).
* The standard buttons are easy (BTN_START, BTN_SELECT, BTN_MODE, BTN_THUMBL, BTN_THUMBR).
* The vibration motor should work just fine with the Force Feedback evdev API
* The accelerometer should use ABS_RX/RY/RZ for rotation, translation is more problematic since the only logical thing would be to use ABS_X/Y/Z, but it’s already used for the main control, and applications don’t expect an accelerometer there anyway.
* Last but not least, the pressure-sensitive buttons are a lot more problematic, each button is acting like an absolute axis. Most programs don’t expect to receive absolute axis values for buttons, only a pressed/released information. The good thing would be to send the simple button press information as well as the pressure information as an axis, except that we don’t have any way to do that (I guess that ABS_PRESSURE is a global device attribute and not specific to the event being sent).

So in the end, I think that:
– we should have additional axes for accelerometers (ABS_ACCX, ABS_ACCY, ABS_ACCZ, ABS_ACCRX, ABS_ACCRY, ABS_ACCRZ)
– we should have an extension for pressure-sensitive buttons, maybe something a little similar to multi-touch and/or ABS_PRESSURE.
– If we don’t have that, then the good thing would be to not export those features and just have the standard buttons and sticks.

Note that accelerometer support would allow to support the wiimote as well.

(I think that the current dualshock driver exposes all analog controls, all accelerometer data and all pressure-related buttons as separates absolute axes, and then all buttons as buttons as well, which is a mess if the end app is not aware of it)

I have a DualShock 3 and I wasted many hours on the internet finding a way for it to work well on Linux. The goal was to play Super Meat Boy and Bastion on Linux with a controller.

The solution I found was to use a program called “xboxdrv”. It creates a virtual joystick device that’s recognized by programs as an Xbox 360 controller, and all the DualShock 3 buttons are mapped appropriately. So with that program I was able to play both games perfectly (using USB only; I have the controller synched to a PS3 so I didn’t want to deal with Bluetooth). Also worth noting is that these particular games only support the Xbox 360 controller, so the driver was very useful.

Anyway, I hope this helps. You can find xboxdrv here: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/xboxdrv.html. It’s also packaged in Debian/Ubuntu and available in Arch’s AUR.

It comes with a configuration file for the Dual Shock 3, and I also had to invert some of the axis for it to work right. Here’s the resulting line once you get the binary and the Dual Shock preset in place:

xboxdrv -s –axismap -Y1=Y1 –axismap -Y2=Y2 -c playstation3.xboxdrv