Was a fan of this gamepad, so now there's a Linux driver which is included with Raspbian

[hzulla]

Hi there,

wanted to let you know that there is now a gamepad driver that mentions "Retropie" found in the next upstream Linux kernel.

Some time ago I bought two gamepads for my kids. The game controller is a BigBen PS3OFMINIPAD "Kid-friendly Wired Controller" and it was originally sold as an accessory to the PS3. The gamepad feels better than other cheap controllers, the small size is nice for kids and adults and it supports rumble / force feedback effects.

However, the rumble effects which worked with a PS3 were nowhere to be found when connecting the gamepad to a Linux box. Also, some of the controls were mapped to the wrong game commands on Linux. After some research and tests with two different sniffing devices, I learned how to sniff the HID traffic on the USB connection between the gamepad and a PS3 (and added a small tutorial for the wireshark wiki about that). After finding the custom force feedback commands, the device driver was soon ready.

It then took yet another few weeks of code review on the Linux mailing list to have it accepted for 4.20 and now the Raspbian kernel team has accepted to backport it to the generic Raspberry Pi kernel for both the current 4.14 and the next 4.19 Raspbian kernels. It should arrive with one of the next Raspbian package updates.

So buying a gamepad for my kids resulted in some months of open source development and documentation and I'm quite happy and just wanted to brag about the result here.

[markwkidd]

Welcome to the world of the rabbit hole!

[Clyde]

The meek will inherit the earth …

@hzulla That said, you have all the right to brag about this the whole day. 😊

[BuZz]

@Clyde said in Was a fan of this gamepad, so now there's a Linux driver which is included with Raspbian:

The meek will inherit the earth …

Don't you mean geek? ;-)

[BuZz]

@hzulla nice job :-) My favourite kind of first posts.

[Clyde]

@BuZz Indeed! 😄