Use your DS4 gamepad as a keyboard with touchpad while laying on the couch!
This is a proof of concept implementation of virtual keyboard device that enables you to press any of these keyboard buttons with Dualshock 4 gamepad. It currently works only on Linux and have non-trivial way to set up and run.
You will need a C compiler (GCC or Clang) and make utility. Download and
unpack zip archive of this repo or clone it with git. Then run the following
from the root of the downloaded repo directory:
make
It will produce a binary named main.
You can connect your DS4 gamepad to your PC either with USB cable or Bluetooth wireless connection. USB is just works, skip to the next section if you are gonna use USB. Here is some guidance for getting a Bluetooth connection.
Run bluetoothctl from terminal. In bluetoothctl console enable scan. I usually do it like this:
scan on
You may need to enable power on the bluetooth controller, register a default agent and maybe some other things. Please refer to bluetoothctl documentation elsewhere (Arch wiki has pretty good article on this though).
Then push "SHARE" and "PS" buttons on the gamepad simultaneously and hold them for a couple of seconds. The LED light on the controller must start flashing for short periods with long pauses (around 100ms of light to 1 second of darkness interval). After this you will see than bluetoothctl found the "Wireless Controller" device like this:
[NEW] Device D0:BC:C1:A2:BE:9F Wireless Controller
Go connect to it:
[bluetooth]# connect D0:BC:C1:A2:BE:9F
Attempting to connect to D0:BC:C1:A2:BE:9F
Connection successful
[Wireless Controller]# devices
Device D0:BC:C1:A2:BE:9F Wireless Controller
[Wireless Controller]#
Perfect! We've got a connection.
First of all you need to be able to open /dev/uinput as a user, unless you
decided to do everything from root. Do this for your user as root if you want
to be able to run the virtual keyboard as user:
chown user:user /dev/uinput
Read the content of a file /proc/bus/input/events to another file on the disk or pipe it to some text editor or viewer. For example:
cat /proc/bus/input/devices | less
Then find there an entry for "Sony Interactive Entertainment Wireless Controller". It will look like this:
I: Bus=0003 Vendor=054c Product=09cc Version=8111
N: Name="Sony Interactive Entertainment Wireless Controller"
P: Phys=usb-0000:02:00.0-1.4.2.4/input3
S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.2/0000:02:00.0/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4.2/1-1.4.2.4/1-1.4.2.4:1.3/0003:054C:09CC.000B/input/input27
U: Uniq=d0:bc:c1:a2:be:9f
H: Handlers=js0 event23
B: PROP=0
B: EV=1b
B: KEY=7fdb000000000000 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=3003f
B: MSC=10
If you don't see any entries for "Sony Interactive Entertainment something something..." and you are sure that your USB cable is good or that you are definitely connected to the gamepad via bluetooth, then go mess around with your kernel config and find a way to enable DS4 support.
The line H: Handlers=js0 event23 is what we need. event23 is the gamepad event source name that is gonna be intercepted and substituted by the program. You may end up with different number with the word event. Anyway you must use the proper file name you've got from your /proc/bus/input/devices in the following commands instead of event23.
Once again, if you are planning to use virtual keyboard as user, you must make sure the /dev/input/event23 file is accessible by the user. Usually /dev/input/event* files have group set to input, so if you add user to the input group, you will be fine. Otherwise you may just change the owner of the file to be your user like this (run as root):
chown user:user /dev/input/event23
Then run the program like this:
./main /dev/input/event23
If you want to run the program every time you connect the gamepad the following instruction may help. Or may not, who knows. At least it worked out for me.
Copy ds4-keyboard-udev-autorun.sh and main files from this repo somewhere to be convenient for you. For example I put them both in /etc/udev/rules.d directory.
Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-ds4.rules and add the following contents:
SUBSYSTEM=="input", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="05c4", RUN+="/etc/udev/rules.d/ds4-keyboard-udev-autorun.sh $devpath /etc/udev/rules.d/main"
SUBSYSTEM=="input", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="09cc", RUN+="/etc/udev/rules.d/ds4-keyboard-udev-autorun.sh $devpath /etc/udev/rules.d/main"
To make udev use new rules and re-trigger events to execute them right away without rebooting, you can run the following command as root:
udevadm control --reload-rules && udevadm trigger
The program starts in non-keyboard mode. Press the "PS" button (round one in the middle) to switch to the keyboard mode. Now you can issue keyboard keypresses by pressing some combinations of the gamepad buttons as shown in the following chart:
The key press is registered when you let go of at least one of the buttons in the combination (chord) you pressed. So you first press the desired chord and then release all the buttons to commit a key press.
Authors:
- Vladimir Novikov – oxore@protonmail.com
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. See
UNLICENSE for more information.