Alternatives
Products that do what I wrote a small lib to turn a USB gamepad into a Bluetooth one does
I had two old USB gamepads lying around that I wanted to use, but my computer is too far from the couch, so I wrote a little ESP32-S3 firmware that turns USB gamepads into Bluetooth ones. You connect your gamepad to the ESP32-S3 with an OTG cable, power the ESP32 with either 5V somehow or a powered USB hub, and now you can pair the controller via Bluetooth to your PC!
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Hi HN! I built Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay, a tool that lets Bluetooth devices (like keyboards and mice) connect to USB-only hosts using a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Why? My friend needed a way to use his Bluetooth mouse and keyboard on a PC with Bluetooth disabled due to policy restrictions. This tool acts as a bridge, relaying Bluetooth input over USB. It also lets you use Bluetooth peripherals with older devices that only support USB input. Tech: Written in Go, optimized for Raspberry Pi Zero W. I love HN’s community and often lurk here—I’m hoping this project is useful or at least sparks…
2024 · github.com
- 2ERESP32 RC Cars▲335
This is a projected I started that blends both the fun of playing a split screen multiplayer driving game and controlling real rc cars. The cars can also be controlled via bluetooth gamepads and is meant to be easily hackable.
2025 · github.com
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2022 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm Erwin. I built a small free open-source utility that bridges Bluetooth LE MIDI keyboards into the new Windows MIDI Services stack so any DAW or Web MIDI app can use them as if they were wired. I bought a Roland FP-90X piano partly because it had Bluetooth MIDI. On my Windows 11 PC, pairing succeeded, but my DAW couldn't see the keyboard, and notes I sent from the PC never made the piano sing. After a regrettable number of evenings, I'd separated this into three independent bugs stacked on top of each other. The first one is the famous one: Windows only natively exposes BLE-MIDI…
May 2026
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2019 · blog.oxplot.com
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Hi HN, I made a keyboard emulator that tracks your body pose and emits the key presses accordingly. My main motivation was to make my kids move more on rainy days. I already made a couple of mini-games using the body pose [1-3], and those were definitely fun to make and play! However, once the kids learned the tricks, they got bored. I could only produce that much content myself, and soon realized that I lack time for churning out games. Finally, I decided to tap into an endless pool of PC games, preferrably simple and less addictive ones like the Gameboy and DOS games. This project has been…
2023 · github.com
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2014 · forum.espruino.com
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This website uses undocumented HID commands of both DS4 and DualSense to re-center and recalibrate DualShock analog sticks.
2024 · blog.the.al
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2017 · midipadapp.com
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2021 · github.com
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I've been playing around with ESP32 MCUs and displays for a while and finally got around to getting a ZX Spectrum emulator working. I then saw that you can now do full color silk screen printing on PCBs and got the thinking - the ESP32 has capacitive touch capabilities - I could make a full ZX Spectrum keyboard on a PCB along with all the electronics for running the emulator. And it actually works! There's a full video here: https://youtu.be/foP81O48WAI And you can sign up here for updates as I move towards getting it ready for a production run:…
2024
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2015 · github.com
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I recently dug my Nintendo GameCube out of storage to revisit the first Animal Crossing game. Things were mostly as I remembered, but the game's heavy reliance on a clunky on-screen keyboard quickly wore my patience thin. Unwilling to accept this subpar experience, I did what any rational person would do and ordered a rare, Japan-exclusive, keyboard/controller hybrid on eBay, then used a Raspberry Pi Pico to 1. listen for keypresses and 2. send simulated controller events to the GameCube, automating typing in Animal Crossing at a Tool-Assisted Speedrun level. Of course, this oddball…
2025 · github.com
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2015 · nodule.io
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2019 · github.com
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A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com
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