Xbox360 controller C integration

This blog has been moved: http://scholtyssek.org/blog/2014/08/16/xbox360-controller-c-integration/

Today I have written some simple example code to integrate a Xbox360 controller into a C-based program. It reads the values of the controller axis and the buttons and displays them on the screen. The following picture shows the output of the code:

In this case the buttons "A" and "TL", which is the top left button, were pressed. The project is called xboxControllerClient can be downloaded from my repository at https://code.google.com/p/scholtyssek-blogspot/.

The whole configuration is in the header file xboxController.h. There the mapping of the buttons and the axis is implemented. The data will be stored in a struct called xboxCtrl. It is also is in the header file . The following example shows how to use the code:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include "xboxController.h"

int main(int argc, char **argv) {

 if (initXboxContoller(XBOX_DEVICE) >= 0) {
  xboxCtrl* xbox = getXboxDataStruct();
  readXboxControllerInformation(xbox);

  printf("xbox controller detected\n\naxis:\t\t%d\nbuttons:\t%d\nidentifier:\t%s\n",
    xbox->numOfAxis, xbox->numOfButtons, xbox->identifier);

  while (1) {
   readXboxData(xbox);
   printXboxCtrlValues(xbox);
  }

  deinitXboxController(xbox);
 }
 return 0;
}

The method initXboxContoller(XBOX_DEVICE) opens a connection to the device /dev/input/js0. This device is set as the default device. To change this, change the value of XBOX_DEVICE. Next, the method getXboxDataStruct() returns a pointer to the data stuct xboxCtrl. In this struct, all informations are strored. You can update the informations with a periodic call of  readXboxData(xbox). To print the state of the XBox controller, you should call printXboxCtrlValues(xbox). That's it, happy coding :-)