DS5 Multi-Bridge

A personal fork of DS5-Linux-Bridge, firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W that turns it into a low-latency USB-to-Bluetooth bridge for the Sony DualSense. The upstream project reproduces the wired experience over Bluetooth, including the speaker, microphone, and HD haptics, with Linux and SteamOS as the priority target.

The fork started as an experiment: I wanted to turn my Fractal Ridge HTPC into a PS5-like console that boots from a controller, and I used it as my first real test of Claude Fable on a hardware problem. It grew from there into something shaped around my own living room.

What the fork adds

• Up to four controllers on one dongle. Each pad shows up to the host as its own USB gamepad, seats are assigned in session order like a PS5, and pads can be moved between slots from the config page. Audio streams only while a single pad is connected, since Bluetooth can’t carry it for more.
• A WS2812B LED status strip with per-slot colors and animations for connected, low battery, and idle states, plus fixed codes for flash mode and a crashed firmware. The layout is configurable, so a line, a ring, or several LEDs per seat all work.
• Configuration over USB with WebHID. A single static HTML page talks to the dongle through its own HID interface, so there is no WiFi setup, no server, and nothing on the LAN can reach it. WiFi is kept only for Wake-on-LAN.
• Reliability fixes beyond upstream. Bonds survive reflashes, flash writes no longer hang the main loop into a watchdog reboot, and the heap has headroom over the Opus audio codec.
• A Dockerized build with a pinned toolchain, so nothing needs to be installed on the host.
• A 3D-printable case bracket in OpenSCAD.

Links

• Source on GitHub
• Upstream project by kungaa
• User guide

Details

• Language: C++ on the Pico SDK, with C, CMake, and a WebHID page in plain HTML
• License: GPL-3.0
• All credit for the core firmware belongs to the original authors