BLE Gamepad esp32

[salarizadi]

I am making a gamepad. I want to make a gamepad for my mobile phone with esp32 that can be connected to my mobile phone with bluetooth, but I did not fully understand how I can send the necessary codes or letters from esp32 to my mobile phone with bluetooth and perform the operation. If you can write a sample or send a project sample link, I would be grateful 🙏

[mkellner]

That sounds like a great project!

There is a blog post with sample projects that can be found here:

https://www.moddable.com/blog/bleremotes/

[salarizadi]

I understood and did all the Bluetooth steps. When I want to find my mobile in the Bluetooth list with esp32, unfortunately, it cannot find my mobile, only my laptop and my watch. What is the reason?

[salarizadi]

@phoddie

Excellent. Would you please share your solution? It may help others.

When the project is finished, I'll upload all the code with descriptions to my GitHub page 😉

[andycarle]

@salarizadi As @phoddie notes, you are heading into an area that requires a real understanding of the HID specification. To accomplish your goals, you must update the HID report map and descriptors in hid.js to contain the device types and buttons/keys/joysticks/etc. that you wish to report from your ESP32 to your phone. This is not a small project, but it is very doable.

The starting point for this work is the (rather archaic) HID Descriptor Tool. That is available from the USB Implementors Forum here. You can use that tool to update the HID report map and descriptor I included in the HID Host that powers the BLE Remotes examples you have been using. That descriptor is documented in the HID Peripheral Host documentation's HID Report Descriptor section.

I can help you further down this path (I have done much of this work before for one-off projects), but for you to build a custom solution, you'll really need to understand this stuff yourself. I recommend spending some time with the HID specification documents, forum posts about HID descriptors, and HID sample code from other (not Moddable SDK) projects. Nothing that you need to change is specific to the Moddable SDK, JavaScript, or even BLE--it's all core USB HID stuff from the mid-'90s.

[salarizadi]

@andycarle @phoddie

happy New Year 🎊 good news!
Finally, I was able to make the phone and other devices recognize the esp32 as a gamepad :)

But unfortunately...no matter what I do, it doesn't send the codes through Bluetooth. I'm still working on this problem, I didn't think it would be so much trouble to make a gamepad 🤦‍♂️

[andycarle]

@salarizadi What do your HID input reports look like? It may be that your input report doesn't match the length specified by your HID descriptor. Or that you have a mismatch between the report ID referenced in the descriptor and that report ID used for the input report.

[salarizadi]

@andycarle Unfortunately I couldn't fix it, I did everything I could, tested more than 20 HID report maps, cleaned the code several times, read the old 90's docs and the new docs, but unfortunately I couldn't fix it 🤦‍♂️