pi400kb VS xpadneo

There is an issue open for macros here that seems to hint you have to grab the keyboard first:

Go here https://github.com/Gadgetoid/pi400kb and follow the instructions.

See my reply elsewhere - look at GitHub here for your keyboard issue.

It's not easy (see this GitHub repository for a 400 HID example and this Pi 4 MagPi article for a network example) and NOT just plug and play.

Mirroring laptop + using the Pi400 as keyboard: thanks to Pi400kb, I can pretty much run Windows with some Linux benefits. It may be considered a silly setup because the Pi becomes a glorified and ore expensive keyboard for the laptop, but I have the advantage of a more stable setup. The Pi can also still run headless tasks via cron, so it's not totally useless.

I'm currently working on getting Kali Linux installed and working on my Pi400 with an adafruit screen attached to the GPIO port. It's a convenient size for hand-carrying, and with the screen disconnected it could pass (to the casual observer) as a simple compact keyboard. Especially when paired with the pi400kb "driver" [1]

That it'll run off of a USB battery pack for quite some time is an added bonus. It's obviously not as powerful as a dedicated laptop but as a "cyberdeck" or an incognito penetration test device, I think it'll find a place of regular usage in my life.

[1] https://github.com/Gadgetoid/pi400kb

In the other distros I've tried (ubuntu / pop os) I usually solve the problem by installing xpadneo using the official method that can be found here. But this doesn't seem to be working in this case. I've already tried using gnome bluetooth settings, blueman and bluetoothctl.

That was more than a year ago though and it seems some people are working on linux drivers. xpadneo is probably a good starting point: https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo

If that doesn't work either, I would try making an issue on their github and asking there: https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/issues

2) install https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo

This very same controller has worked on this very same physical computer in the past, but under Ubuntu using the xpadneo driver (https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/). One day, for no reason as near as I can tell, it simply stopped working and showed the exact same symptoms as above (controller works for phone, not for PC, doesn't show up in bluetooth list. Other bluetooth devices work fine with the PC). This triggered my distro-hop to Endeavour just to discover the exact same issue.

You can try this custom mapping from xpadneo: https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/blob/master/docs/SDL.md