Life & fun · December 17, 2025
I wrote a small lib to turn a USB gamepad into a Bluetooth one
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!
I wrote a small lib to turn a USB gamepad into a Bluetooth one launched on December 17, 2025 with 26 votes, #533 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This project is an ESP32-S3 firmware that converts USB gamepads into Bluetooth controllers. Users connect their USB gamepad to the microcontroller via an OTG cable and power it with 5V or a powered hub, then pair the controller wirelessly to their PC. It's designed for anyone with old USB gamepads who wants to use them away from their computer without running long cables.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A small hardware device that converts a wired gamepad into a Bluetooth one. - skorokithakis/bluetooth-gamepad
ESP32-S3 firmware that turns a USB HID gamepad into a Bluetooth LE (BLE) gamepad . Plug a wired controller into the board (USB Host), and the firmware advertises as a BLE gamepad so a phone/tablet/PC can connect to it wirelessly. Power note: some controllers draw more current than the XIAO can comfortably supply. If your controller doesn’t enumerate or resets, use a powered hub. This is a PlatformIO project ( platformio.ini ). The default environment enables USB Host (OTG) and routes debug output to a hardware UART. The project uses a custom partition table referenced by platformio.ini : At a high level, the firmware runs a USB Host stack to enumerate a connected HID controller, parses the…from github.com
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