Creating an Xinput Library for Teensyduino

Recently Jeremy Williams from Tested! has been working on his very own controller. This one emulated another classic arcade giant, the pinball machine. Running into the same issues I experienced creating a fight-stick, he came across my project and began contacting me. I was more than ecstatic to work with Jeremy on his project. I began editing my own fight-stick code to accommodate the needs of his pinball controller. This went on for a while before I had a large amount of unused code and variables sitting oddly idle on my screen. Making my code clunky and convoluted was not my intention, but it quickly became my reality. I discussed my concerns and options with Jeremy and he expressed that he was more than willing to rework his code base if I moved to an Xinput library for the teensyduino IDE. This was my new course of action and I think it turned out really well in the end.

I created lots of useful functions and even multiple ways of doing certain actions based on use case. I kept adding functionality as Jeremy saw needs for things in his project. He even suggested lots of features that he didn’t need himself, but just happened to think of while working with the library. I updated the fight-stick code to work with the new library and pushed it to GIT. I also fixed compatibility issues people were having with compiling on the latest teensyduino. I included the new fight-stick code and a simple example in the library and made them accessible using the Example menu option. Unfortunately, changing the code and switching to using a library nullified a lot of the documentation I did here in my blog posts. Most of the USB portion holds true, but has just been moved to the library. I really hope to rewrite the “making of” blog to better suit the library, but for the time being you can either cross reference the code into the new library or get an older version of the fight stick code from GitHub.

My current workload for this project revolves around completing the documentation for the library. I want to do a nice API guide write-up for using the library. I really think this update to a library has made my code more accessible for generic use instead of how specific it was before. I am hoping this allows people to start crafting really neat and innovative controllers, especially for VR use like Jeremy has done!

Check out these links:

MSF FightStick Code Base
MSF Xinput Library Code Base
Jeremy William’s PinSim Controller over at Tested!

Thanks
-ZACK-