Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Everyone should take a look at this

Another blogger who goes by the name of Matlo posted in the comments of my last post that he had been working on a project that might be of interest to me. His project was to use a bluetooth dongle and a PC to emulate a six axis controller. The effectively eliminates the need for any kind of intermediary device. The only trick to it is that you can't just use any bluetooth dongle. I read over his blog, which is located at diy-machine.blogspot.com, and I decided to order a bluetooth dongle to see if I could make this work. Dongles that are compatible are listed on his blog, and after reading the list, I decided to purchase the Syba SY-ADA23012 adapter from Newegg.com. I'm not sure that it will work, but it does contain the necessary bluetooth chipset and support V2.0+EDR. I should have the adapter before Saturday, so I'll let everyone know if it works. If it does, this may be our next best bet since he's done all the leg work.

If you don't feel up to reading his blog, here's a quick run down of how it works. Right now Linux is the only supported OS, but everything will run from within a virtual machine or from a live cd. The first step after installing the necessary libraries is to grab the bluetooth address of one of your controllers while it's on and connected to the PS3. After doing that, you then use another set of tools to modify the bluetooth address of the dongle to match that of the PS3 controller. Then it's just a matter of starting two programs via the linux terminal and you're off to the races.

Right now there isn't any fancy GUI or even a button configurator... all that's done by directly modifying one of his source files. However, the entire project is open source and a fancy front-end could be whipped up for those that can't live without it.

Stay tuned... things just keep getting more and more interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment