The browser reached this node through `dora-websocket-transceiver`: a second
node, a second port, and a round trip through the dataflow for every button
press, to carry a UI only this node can interpret. The node now serves the
page and holds the browsers' sockets itself on one port, so the console is
one URL and a consumer wires nothing for it.
`dora_teleop/server.py` runs aiohttp on a thread of its own and meets the
control loop at two non-blocking points: a bounded queue the tick drains, and
a snapshot handed back. Both queues are bounded deliberately — a flood is
dropped rather than grown, and a slow browser loses stale snapshots rather
than the newest — because nothing a browser does may stall the thread that
stops the arm. A port already in use stops the node rather than leaving it
announcing a console nobody can open.
The web deadman moved but did not change: it was a `clients` message from the
bridge and is now the open-socket count read each tick. One hop fewer, same
meaning.
Contract, so 0.2.0 -> 0.3.0: `ui_command` and `clients` are gone. `ui_state`
stays published for `dora topic echo` and the bench, with no browser reading
it. New WEB_HOST and WEB_PORT (7000; 0 opens no port).
The console itself is laid out like the arm's own pendant — two rings
quartered into arc sectors you hold, each with its out-of-plane axis as pills
above. Directions and signs match xArm Studio on the controller, `Y+` on the
left included: two consoles driving one arm that disagree about which way is
+Y is a trap, not a preference.
Also sends a velocity only when it changes, repeating an unchanged one on
JOG_KEEPALIVE_S (0.2 s) purely to beat the consumer's own expiry. Repeating
every tick made `dora-ulite6` re-plan the same motion twenty times a second.
That turned out not to be the whole cause of the stepping an operator felt —
the rest was fixed in dora-ulite6 v0.3.1, pinned here — but sending 18
messages where 83 went before is worth keeping on its own.
`dora-joy` moves to v0.1.1: v0.1 is an annotated tag, and dora 1.0.1 records
the tag object's id as the commit hash and then rejects its own checkout for
sitting on the peeled commit. Neither dataflow could be built before this.
The pad moves to dora-joy, so this node keeps no hardware dependency and the
pad becomes reusable. It arrives on `joy` as a plain reading; `JoyInput.read`
treats silence past JOY_TTL_S as absence, because that node dying looks like
silence rather than like an unplugged pad and the arm cannot tell them apart.
Both control sources are now normalised to a [-1, 1] six-vector before anything
is scaled, and the scaling happens in one function. The web path used to pass a
velocity straight through without going near mapping, which is why the console
had to speak the arm's units. It no longer does.
`twist` (SI) and `command` (robot-agnostic verbs) are the standard ports. `jog`
and `request` still carry the same intent in dora-ulite6's units and service
names so the two repositories can move independently; LEGACY_REQUEST is the
only place that knows what that node calls a verb. Wire one or the other, never
both. `joint_jog` is specified in the manifest and deliberately not built.
Schemas are declared rather than inferred: pyarrow reads a null `value` as its
own type, so an inferred `command` would change its port's type between one
verb and the next.
Three bugs found while moving this code, each with a test:
- `Sample.active` compared raw axes against a threshold, but SDL rests a
trigger at -1.0, so every connected pad read as in use for ever: the pad took
the lease on plug-in and GAMEPAD_IDLE_RELEASE_S never fired.
- The e-stop latch was never consulted when deciding a velocity, so Back
stopped the arm for one tick and the next stick nudge drove it again. Nothing
on the pad could clear it either. It is now checked above the lease, and X
releases it and clears the controller's error, as the console's RESET does.
- Buttons were read before the arbiter granted the lease, so the first press
after the pad had been idle was swallowed: not owned yet when read, and no
longer a rising edge by the next tick.
The reader owns the pad on a thread of its own, and nothing outside that file
may touch pygame: everything else sees a plain immutable Sample. That is what
lets the rest of the node be tested with no hardware, and what keeps SDL's
quirks out of the arm logic.
Sample.present is the field that matters. A pad that has been unplugged reads as
absent rather than as centred, so "the operator let go" and "the pad fell off
the desk" stay distinguishable — they call for the same stop, but only one of
them is worth logging.
Only the display and joystick subsystems are initialised. pygame.init() also
opens audio, which on a headless robot fills stderr with ALSA errors for a
device this node never uses; the display is needed despite there being no
window, because SDL refreshes joystick state during the event pump.
Settings are parsed once at startup so a deadzone that would silently make the
pad inert stops the node before it joins the dataflow.