[sharing for less plastic in the ocean] Steam controller through HI

vichug's icon

If you were curious enough to get one of those things called 'steam controller', especially during the sale last november, here is a little patcher to help make it communicate with Max. So don't throw it away immediately and give it a try ! (if you don't have one, they are out of stock and discontinued now, so look somewhere else...)

It's far from perfect though because steam controller was designed to work best from within the Steam environement, and the HID driver is lacking some things :
* no success in getting the gyroscope data
* if you press a one-state button for a long time, it may not send an event when you release it, and stay stuck on "on" state
* by default, it acts as a replacement for keyboard and mouse. You must go through the steam interface and clear each inpout for the desktop configuration if you want to have it communicate only through Max and not interfere with mouse and keyboard.
* this was done on macOS, i'm not sure how it will behave on Windows, it may be different.

Have fun !

steamcontroller-example.maxpat
Max Patch

steamcontroller.maxpat
Max Patch


Ian Aegerter's icon

Hello! Could you please explain how you would integrate this with the HI object and how you would set this up with the Steam Controller? I'm very new to Max and this is the only controller I have.

Thanks!

vichug's icon

Hey Ian, if you plug your controller, then open steamcontroller-example.maxpat, then begin pushing buttons on the controller ; you should see the ui objects in the patcher react. However a 21 has magically transformed into a 20 for an unknown reason so this new version of steamcontroller.maxpat may work better.

steamcontroller.maxpat
Max Patch