Let me be clear.

I do not want to maintain a Bluetooth LE library for any platform, much less as many platforms as possible.

Unfortunately, my circumstances are such that this isn’t a choice I get to make. It’s either build and maintain a library, or depend on whatever I can find elsewhere. There wasn’t, and to this day, still isn’t anything elsewhere that met my needs.

If I do have to build the library, I do not want to do it for free. I also don’t want to support or think about the library, therefore I do not want to do it for pay. As I hate support and divided attention more than I like money (and maybe some poor suckers who also do things for free will show up and help), I am stuck doing it for free.

Thus begins the story of yet another reluctant developer gluing things together until they curse themselves into being an open source maintainer.

Continue reading “How to Beg/Borrow/Steal Your Way to a Cross Platform Bluetooth LE Library”

At this point, it’s fair to say that I’ve built at least some of my career on the back of a single trick: Haptics Rerouting, or more appropriately, Rumble Rerouting. This involves taking a video game on PC or Console, catching specific game state or else rumble signals from the game to the gamepad, and pointing them at other things.

Rumble rerouting has become popular on TikTok/Twitch/Youtube/etc too, with people hooking up all sorts of large haptics to desks and basically liquefying furniture (or themselves) with games.

However, in my case, the other things are usually sex toys.

Some examples of my projects include:

• SeXBox Xbox Rumble Controller Hardware Mod (2005)
• Rez Trancevibrator/Rez Infinite Rework (2018)
• Animal Crossing Rumble Rerouting (2020)
• Elden Ring Rumble Rerouting (2022)

These projects are built on more general platforms:

• Intiface Game Haptics Router
• Buttpcap
• Intiface Console Game Haptics Router

While these projects are fun to post to social media and show off at conferences, I’ve never really written up the technical background of what this requires. With the Elden Ring project done and dusted I figured now’s the time to put together an overview of how these various stunt hacks have come together, including where they sit in the technology stack, how they access the parts of a game or the surrounding system that they need to do what it is they do, and the impact they’ve had around making for good shitposts.

There comes a time in every software poorly planned open source software project where you have to sit back and say “Wait, am I completely off the mark? Did I totally fuck this up?”.

Of course, these times really shouldn’t happen at a frequency of once a month, but here we are. Unlike prior fuckups, this time I have a blog, so instead of fixing things, I can write about them!

But to be fair, a bit of self reflection is good before starting on the fixings.