A while back I bought a USB gamepad from for controlling a foam missile launcher, and recently decided to re-purpose it for controlling a GNU/Linux computer. After all VLC is great, but plugging in a keyboard is not so great!

The gamepad imitates a Super Nintendo controller in terms of size and button placement, and is apparently a USB joystick in disguise. From lsusb:

Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0079:0011 DragonRise Inc. Gamepad

The only packaged program for mapping this to keyboard events in Debian was joy2key. It was too cryptic for me to figure out in under 5 minutes, so I looked for alternatives. Google turned up xjoypad, jkeys and jscal as suggestions, but QJoypad looked the most promising, and had an interface which matched my expectations of how this type of program works:

To compile it, you need the QT development libraries, and an X library called libxtst-dev

The profile in the screenshot (called “VLC”) controls the mouse, pauses, adjusts volume, and toggles fullscreen. It works well enough for media and web browsing, as long as you don’t need to type anything!

Bugs I noticed:

• Can’t set a button to Ctrl + < Key >, only the key on its own.