joycontrol

Emulate Nintendo Switch Controllers over Bluetooth.

Tested on Ubuntu 19.10 and with Raspberry Pi 4B Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)

Installation

• Install dbus-python package

sudo apt install python3-dbus

• Clone the repository and install the joycontrol package to get missing dependencies (Note: Controller script needs super user rights, so python packages must be installed as root). In the joycontrol folder run:

sudo pip3 install .

• Disable the bluez "input" plugin, see #8

Command line interface example

• Run the script

sudo python3 run_controller_cli.py PRO_CONTROLLER

This will create a PRO_CONTROLLER instance waiting for the Switch to connect.

• Open the "Change Grip/Order" menu of the Switch

The Switch only pairs with new controllers in the "Change Grip/Order" menu.

Note: If you already connected an emulated controller once, you can use the reconnect option of the script (-r "<Switch Bluetooth Mac address>"). This does not require the "Change Grip/Order" menu to be opened. You can find out a paired mac address using the "bluetoothctl" system command.

• After connecting, a command line interface is opened. Note: Press <enter> if you don't see a prompt.

Call "help" to see a list of available commands.

• If you call "test_buttons", the emulated controller automatically navigates to the "Test Controller Buttons" menu.

Issues

• When using a Raspberry Pi 4B the connection drops after some time. Might be a hardware issue, since it works fine on my laptop. Using a different bluetooth adapter may help, but haven't tested it yet.
• Incompatibility with Bluetooth "input" plugin requires a bluetooth restart, see #8
• It seems like the Switch is slower processing incoming messages while in the "Change Grip/Order" menu. This causes flooding of packets and makes pairing somewhat inconsistent. Not sure yet what exactly a real controller does to prevent that. A workaround is to use the reconnect option after a controller was paired once, so that opening of the "Change Grip/Order" menu is not required.
• ...

Resources

Nintendo_Switch_Reverse_Engineering

console_pairing_session