StickDeck

Turn your Steam Deck into a joystick for your PC, with trackpad and gyro support!

Setup

Server Side (Steam Deck)

Important

The server side will be treated as a game on Steam Deck, so you can't play Steam games on PC while the server side is running on Steam Deck with the same Steam account. You can still play non-Steam games on PC, or you can register a new Steam account for the server side.

Install from GitHub

1. Switch to Desktop Mode on Steam Deck. All the following steps are done on Steam Deck in the desktop mode.
2. Download stickdeck-vX.X.X.zip from the latest release and extract it.
3. Run setup.sh in the extracted folder.
4. Run launch.sh on Steam Deck, this should open a new window, but your input is not captured now. Close the window by tapping the Exit button.
5. Start Steam client (NOT Returning to Gaming Mode) in the Desktop Mode. In your library, you should find a game called Spacewar. Edit its input mapping so that all the inputs are mapped to the correct game actions.
6. Run launch.sh again, click Start Server, now you should see the input when you press buttons or move joysticks on Steam Deck.
7. Now you can exit by tapping the Exit button. Next time you want to start the server, just run launch.sh and click Start Server.

You can also add launch.sh as a non-Steam game on Steam Deck, so you can start the server directly from Steam Deck's Gaming Mode.

Client Side (PC)

1. Install ViGEm Bus Driver and restart your PC.
2. Download stickdeck-win-vX.X.X.zip from the latest release and extract it.

Usage

General

1. Start the server on Steam Deck. Make sure the server is running and the input is captured.
2. Make sure your PC and your Steam Deck are in the same network.
3. Make sure the client on your PC is under the same minor version as the server on Steam Deck.
4. Run launch.bat on your PC. Once you see Virtual controller is ready in the console, StickDeck is ready.
5. (Optional) If you want to test the controller, run joy.cpl (which is a built-in Windows joystick test tool).

Note

By default the client will try to connect steamdeck:7777. If you want to connect to a different server, you can edit launch.bat, replace the steamdeck with your server IP. You can find the server IP on the first line of the StickDeck UI window while the server is started.

Mouse Actions

StickDeck supports mouse move, mouse buttons and mouse wheel. You can configure the trackpad and gyro to control the mouse movement or mouse wheel, and map any action to mouse buttons.

FAQ

• Poll/update rate?
  • Depends on the configurable input update interval. In my case, set the input update interval to 3ms to reach the max update rate of 250+Hz.
  • Besides, the server side will only send the input when there is a change, so the actual update rate will be lower than the configured rate.
  • You can checkout the actual update rate on the PC side by running debug.bat.

Credit

• ViGEm Bus Driver
• stickdeck (PoC version made with Python)
• kontroller

CHANGELOG