Coincidently, I just used a wired 360 controller I had laying around. I plugged it into my laptop (vista) and it installed. Bring up the joystick control and if the controller name doesn't show up, hit refresh. If you see the controller on the joystick control window, then all you need to do is configure the buttons.

So ARC definitely supports it. Maybe it's a windows problem.

Good luck.

Well that didnt work. I tried it with the battery in and out. Still no joystick when I click Refresh. When I had the controller plugged in and turned it on with battery pack, my computer did this:

Device Detected! Device Removed! Device Detected! Device Removed! Etc...

Until I unplugged it from the computer. With out the battery pack it will come up in the device menu in windows, but not in the Joystick box in the ARC.

mabe there is a bad connection with your cable ie broken wire in cable? or low power batteries?

Low power batterys is probably the case. I just got it. I guess I'll have to try it with fully charged later today.

So I wanted to share that I've had great success with my wireless Xbox 360 controller connected to my laptop via the Microsoft USB dongle. If you want to search for the dongle online unfortunately it rarely comes alone, instead it comes with a controller and is usually called "Xbox 360 Wireless Controller for Windows".

The only down side of the 360 controller is that in windows the trigger buttons control the z-axis which isn't included in ARC, but sometimes when you push them random things happen to your bot, it's quite crazy. I like the trigger buttons, and miss them, they are my fav buttons on the controller probably due to too much Halo.

A HUGE up-side is that if you are running Windows 7 you can hook up a Xbox 360 headset to your controller and have both voice recognition and speech synthesis (through the headset speaker) from large distances. From my laptop my controller was still able to communicate up to 75 FEET or GREATER, probably as far as the bluetooth will go (but not as far as synapse ) At work I've done some real world tests with my Optimus Prime EZ-bot.

So here's a mini tutiorial on getting the wireless 360 controller setup:

Download drivers from here.

Hook up your dongle to the USB port and then press and hold the white button down on the dongle for a few seconds to start the link.

Then turn your 360 controller on (using xbox button) and then hold the sync button button down until the ring of light starts circling and then it should sync up and flash a quadrant. You can actually connect 4 controllers to your laptop if you'd like.

Then wait for your USB/microphone/speaker drivers to load, open ARC, configure your joystick and you are good to go!