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It may not have escaped your attention that Valve doesn’t actually sell the Steam Controller Puck as a separate item, meaning the only way to get hold of one is to buy an entire Steam Controller itself. That is, unless you’re prepared to do a little project.
Some clever user on GitHub by the name of safijari has created an open-source firmware that uses the NRF52840 Bluetooth Microcontroller to mimic the wireless protocol of Valve’s official puck, meaning it can take advantage of the proprietary 2.4GHz connection of the Steam Controller. OpenPuck can also be connected to other devices like the Switch and be detected as a Switch Pro Controller.
This alternative also has the benefit of being able to use the Steam Controller fully without Steam Input, meaning you don’t need Steam running, or even installed, in order to use your Steam Controller on your device.
You do, of course, miss out on Valve’s Puck’s charging ability, as there are no metal contacts on the NRF52840 microcontroller with which to charge a controller from, but hey, the benefits may well outweigh the downsides for you.
It’s also worth noting that almost the entire project, by admission of its developer, is coded with the help of AI LLMs, such as Claude. In case that affects your decision of whether to use it or not.
Source: Videocardz
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2 comments
abigail
Incredibly disappointed that you’d advertise vibecoded slop, at your size i’m sure you understand that writing an article in this way promotes the subject matter
Oliver Stogden
This is news, not an advertisement.
We report on news whether we agree with what the news is or not, it’s unbiased, as all news reporting should be.
Unfortunately, this is increasingly common, and many developers won’t even declare that they “vibe coded” their work, I personally appreciate that the developer fully admitted it in this case and has requested that others integrate human written code in the future.
This has been reported on several other tech sites larger than ours, such as Videocardz where the source of the article was from.