Google’s Stadia Controller salvage operation will run for another year
Don’t chuck your Stadia controller just yet. Google abandoned the gaming platform at beginning of this year leaving thousands and thousands of controllers adrift. Hopefully if you have one you’ll at least now be able to save it from the landfill and repurpose it.
With the service dead, the Wi-Fi-only controller wouldn’t work wirelessly, leaving old-school USB as the only way to use the controller. However, Stadia Controllers already came with a dormant Bluetooth chip, so Google cooked up a way to convert the orphaned controllers from Wi-Fi communication to Bluetooth, allowing them to wirelessly connect to computers and phones as a generic HID (Human Interface Device). Normally you’d expect a download for some kind of firmware update program, but Google being Google, the Stadia Controller update process happens entirely on a webpage. Google’s controller update page has a very fancy “WebUSB” API setup—you fire up a Chromium browser, plug in your controller, grant the browser access to the device, and the webpage can access the controller directly and update the firmware, without any program to install.
Looking to hack other controllers? Checkout this guide for a Fisher-Price upgrade
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