The README carried a lot of rationale that AGENTS.md already holds; what is
left is the tables a consumer wires against. It gains the swept axis and
button indices, and says plainly that the axes check themselves at runtime
and the buttons cannot.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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 dataflow turned on `enable_debug_inspection` without the README saying why
anyone would want it, which made it a line of configuration nobody could act on.
Documents the three commands it buys — topic list, topic echo, topic hz — and
that they need a coordinator rather than `dora run`. hz is the one that checks
the timings this node promises, so it names the measurement to expect.
Two problems, both found by the validate job once it could finally run.
categories named `teleop` and `input`, neither of which dora defines. The set is
fixed — sensor, actuator, robot, transform, filter, ml-inference, llm, speech,
communication, recorder, visualization, simulator, debug — and an unknown
variant makes the whole manifest unparseable, so every type annotation in it was
being ignored.
dataflow.yml spanned three repositories through sibling paths, which meant dora
could not resolve the other nodes' manifests and reported their typed outputs as
unannotated. It also could not be validated in CI, which clones one repo. The
house pattern is a self-contained dataflow, and this now follows it: teleop plus
a bench stand-in for the arm and the browser, both from this checkout. The real
three-node wiring moves to README.md, where a consumer would look for it.
The bench answers every service, publishes plausible telemetry, and prints the
velocities it is sent, so the node can be driven from a real gamepad with no
robot in the room. It is not a simulator and must not become one: it never
integrates a velocity or moves a pose.
The axis and button indices in mapping.py are SDL's documented layout rather
than an observed one, and until now the only way to find a pad that numbers
things differently was to watch a real arm move the wrong way.
`dora-teleop-probe` prints the raw axes, the buttons it sees and the velocity
that would be sent, live, with no dataflow and no arm — it cannot move anything.
It goes through the same Gamepad and velocity() the node runs, so what it prints
is what the arm would get; that is the whole reason it is worth having, and the
reason it must not grow its own copy of the mapping.
Every axis is listed, including ones the layout does not use, because an axis
marked unused that moves when a stick is pushed is exactly the finding this is
for. The centred bar makes a worn stick that does not return to zero obvious.
dora-node.yml is the typed contract a consumer wires against, and the only one
they get: no source package is shared between node repositories. The jog,
request and ui ports stay untyped, because dora treats a port carrying
request_id as pattern-correlated and several Arrow schemas legitimately flow
over each — one per service, one per console message.
dataflow.yml runs the whole operator stack from checkouts: this node, the
WebSocket bridge and the arm.
web/ holds a placeholder page, not the real console. It exists so the dataflow
has something to serve and so the node can be checked end to end before the
Control section is ported across from the monolithic repo. It reads telemetry
and can take, release and stop; nothing else.
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.
cristhianandClaude Opus 5