I wrote a small lib to turn a USB gamepad into a Bluetooth one
Details
- External ID
- 46296498
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I wrote a small lib to turn a USB gamepad into a Bluetooth one
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Dec. 17, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 26
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.700381679389313
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- convert usb gamepad to bluetooth
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Developing embedded firmware to parse raw USB HID host packets and translate them into a compliant Bluetooth HID device requires dedicated embedded hardware programming.
What it would actually take: The solution requires C/C++ firmware built on ESP-IDF targeting an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, operating the USB peripheral in USB Host mode to enumerate and parse varied vendor HID reports. It must remap those reports into a standard Bluetooth HID Profile (Classic or BLE HID) and manage low-latency radio transmission and power management. This necessitates deep hardware debugging skills, logic analyzer use, and embedded USB/Bluetooth stack protocol expertise.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Code quality and trustworthiness when LLM-generated without thorough review, Lack of transparency about LLM usage from the start, Author's dismissive communication style discouraging project adoption
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 107 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #40 of 108 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 36 days after the earliest competitor.
- JoyLink: Phone as Gamepad · ph · 2026-09-27 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- WinStadia · github · 2026-09-19 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- MiRemoteBridge · ph · 2026-09-18 · 56 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Remote Magic Trackpad · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- LinkFlick · ph · 2026-09-12 · 73 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Perfect Bluetooth MIDI for Windows · hn · 2026-05-01 · 105 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- ESP32-PC-Control-Deck · github · 2026-09-12 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- phone mouse · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.