Electronic – arduino – Reverse engineer USB HID device: easy way to hack up USB hardware

arduinohidpicraspberry piusb

Background:

I want to make a custom controller for an XBox. Either by butchering an existing controller, or making the hardware and firmware from scratch(ish). (Specifically, the goal is to make an arcade machine style driving simulator with steering wheel etc., directly mapped to buttons on a standard controller.)

I have an unbranded Xbox USB controller which seems to be compliant with USB standards, since connecting it to a PC and using USB packet sniffers confirmed that it's recognised as an HID device and the data coming from it seemed to be simple and made sense.

My question: What would be the most straight forward way of making the USB device from scratch(ish)?

I was going to butcher an existing controller: desolder any variable resistors and replace with my own, e.g. for the steering wheel – and the same for switches. Dead simple. But the problem is, among others, the latency of the controller seems to be pretty poor, and I was hoping to improve on it.

Are there any out-of-the-box solutions such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino or similar, which would, for making an HID device:

  1. Have a library giving the simplest high level interface to the necessary USB protocols, with hello-world HID code samples.
  2. Give me good latency (not hard, I'm sure, given it's a simple HID device)
  3. Preferably via a high level programming language such as Java. (My C programming leaves a lot to be desired)
  4. Not break the bank
  5. Come out-of-the-box with 6+ ADC inputs (>100Hz sample rate, >10 bits) and some digital inputs

Ideas:

  1. Raspberry Pi seems overkill
  2. Arduinos' AFAIK have a reputation for being limited given their proprietary language/compiler.
  3. I usually program 8-bit PIC microprocessors, but I've heard their USB stack is limited, hard to use and generally problematic. Also it would probably mean extra circuitry; or at least hassling with non-DIP packages, making PCBs or whatever else
  4. Program an old Android smartphone to act as an HID device. I don't know which, if any OS versions would allow me to do this without writing or modifying a custom ROM. But the only way I can think of getting analog/digital inputs would be via a bluetooth module which would connect to the phone, no doubt giving terrible latency from end-to-end.

All advice welcome!!

Best Answer

Teensy is quite good at being USB HID: https://pjrc.com/teensy/usb_keyboard.html

But if you want to plug it into an xbox, the software side may be slightly more complicated; I don't think the xbox controllers are simple USB HID and I believe they have anti-cloning systems.

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