This is the driver for the petrockblock.com ControlBlock, which is an extension board for the Raspberry Pi (TM). The driver itself is denoted as controlblock in the following. The driver provides a service for interacting with the power button signals as well as for mapping attached game controllers to corresponding game pad devices on the Raspberry Pi.

Please note that this is the driver for revision 1.X of the ControlBlock. If you have a revision 2.X board, you need to use the driver for that revision series.

To be able to successfully build ControlBlockService you need to have certain APT packages installed. You can make sure that you have the latest version of those packages with these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install -y git cmake g++-4.9 doxygen

If you would like to download the latest version of controlblock from its Github repository, you can use this command:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/petrockblog/ControlBlockService.git

Note that the above command also takes care for downloading the included Git submodules.

There comes an installation script with this reposity that does all the steps described below: install.sh This script compiles the driver, installs the binary and configuration files, and installs the ControlBlock service.

To run the quick installation, you just need to call this one line from the Raspbian console

wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/petrockblog/ControlBlockService/master/install.sh | sudo bash

To build controlblock follow these commands:

cd ControlBlockService
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

If everything went fine you can install the driver from within the folder build with the command

sudo make install

You can install controlblock as daemon from within the folder build with this command:

sudo make installservice

It might be that you need to restart your Raspberry afterwards to have all needed services running.

You can uninstall the daemon from within the folder build with this command:

sudo make uninstallservice

You can uninstall the binary with this command:

sudo make uninstall

The configuration file of controlblock is located at /etc/controlblockconfig.cfg. It uses JSON syntax for setting the the values of its configuration parameters.

The parameters are explained in detail in the following:

• input - gamepadtype: Can be set to
  • arcade: Enables two game pads in the system and maps the GPIOs of the ControlBlock to these game pads.
    
  • mame: Enables a virtual keyboard and maps the GPIOs of the ControlBlock to this keyboard with a MAME layout.
    
  • snes: Enables two game pads in the system and maps the attached SNES/NES controllers accordingly.
    
• input - singlegamepad: Can be set to
  • true: Enables only one gamepad in the system (eg if only Player1 buttons are wired to the controlblock in your setup, this prevents a ghost gamepad from being selected as default player 2 in retroarch)
  • false: Enables the two gamepads (default)
• powerswitch - activated: Can be set to
  • true: Activates the handling of the power switch signals of the ControlBlock.
  • false: Deactivates the handling of the power switch signals of the ControlBlock.

Have fun!

-Florian petrockblock.com