Video: Control the PS3 with a Nokia N900 via BlueMaemo

[PS3 News]

Below is a video from MaemoItalia demonstrating how to control the PS3 with the Nokia N900 via BlueMaemo.

http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/bluemaemo/ is a remote controller program for the Maemo-powered devices. With BlueMaemo you can turn your Maemo-powered device in a mixed Bluetooth keyboard-and-mouse device through the HID Bluetooth profile.

When you have a PlayStation 3 or PC running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X the PS3 / PC is Bluetooth-ready and supports the HID Bluetooth profile. You have a Nokia Nseries phone with BlueMaemo loaded and you're now in control.

Windows XP and Media Center Edition:

- Turn bluetooth on.
- Start BlueMaemo on the device.
- Go to the bluetooth preferences and choose 'Add a new device'.
- Choose the device and choose a blank password (you can also choose a numeric password the PassAgentKey will appear on the device asking for the password).

Recently astrogirl wrote a BlueMaemo http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=259925&postcount=216 for PS3 users, to quote:

The steps I do to pair are: On the PS3 go to the menu Settings > Accessory Settings > Manage Bluetooth Devices.

- Press Register New Device and Start Scanning
- On the n810 I make sure bluetooth is on and open bluemaemo.
- The PS3 will as to enter a key which I typed into the n810. It then gives a message that they are now connected (the n810 just says "Connected to:", as in the ps3 does not have a name)
- To use the most keys (including direction buttons) you have to be on the keyboard profile or assign them in the game controller.
- To use the triangle button you have to be on the mouse profile.

The buttons are:

Triangle: Right mouse button
Square: Backspace
Cross: Enter
Circle: Escape (back button)

Check out the video below!

More PlayStation 3 News...

[kakarotoks]

hehe, I used that a week ago, but it was a bit buggy.. the PS3 support is still being developed and it should work better soon hopefully.

They also have a 'PS3 Control' button (next to mouse/keyboard/keypad) which doesn't do anything when clicked at the moment..
but it's quite nice! If only I could use the hardware keyboard instead of the virtual keyboard, then the mousepad+hardware keyboard would be an awesome combination to drop the ps3 keypad completely (oh and it would need to remember previous pairing and auto-pair).

[Rav]

This would be nice to see on more smart phones, pda, iphones, etc. typing would be pretty fast also, there are many fast texters out there on phones. but for controller use i could see this being hard to play games etc, depending on the phone used.. but very cool. i hope the droid gets this

[kakarotoks]

This would be nice to see on more smart phones, pda, iphones, etc. typing would be pretty fast also, there are many fast texters out there on phones. but for controller use i could see this being hard to play games etc, depending on the phone used.. but very cool. i hope the droid gets this

<troll>droid sucks, maemo rules!</troll>

[Poopsqueege]

This would be nice to see on more smart phones, pda, iphones, etc. typing would be pretty fast also, there are many fast texters out there on phones. but for controller use i could see this being hard to play games etc, depending on the phone used.. but very cool. i hope the droid gets this

I agree with you. But, unfortunately, most cell phones don't have the power to run real programs. The iphone could probably do something similar but I doubt any Palm or Android could handle it. I really wish that my G1 could be used as a remote, but as cool as it sounds it doesn't really add much functionality as a controller--unless it could emulate the PSP and do remote play.

The N900 is pretty much the new super-phone, but it isn't a PSP, a controller, or a big keyboard--but it may make a good remote for movies and would make typing easier. As cool as it sounds it isn't really anything that would improve how you play games, unless you could program scripts into it that could play the game for you with a push of a button.

[Ninjazin]

I only wish that someone would implement this on android phones.

[Rav]

<troll>droid sucks, maemo rules!</troll>

First time i been called that ever LOLZ

Driod is a great phone for people who know how to use it properly.. im gonna go look up this phone myself and see whats great about it.. im sure that nokia has a app for that <---- or has anywhere close to 100,000 apps in there store.. cough cough iphone

[GotNoUsername]

I doubt it will be of any use for the normal people at all. Why do I need to control my PS3 via Handy ?

[canabal]

I just tried it out a couple of days ago. It is great, and I can now get rid of my bluetooth keyboard for my ps3. It mostly sat there and did not get used much anyway.

The N900 is a great phone/computer, I am just worried that there will not be enough 3rd party support for it, which will force me to get an android phone.

[kakarotoks]

First time i been called that ever LOLZ

Driod is a great phone for people who know how to use it properly.. im gonna go look up this phone myself and see whats great about it.. im sure that nokia has a app for that <---- or has anywhere close to 100,000 apps in there store.. cough cough iphone

Well, the main difference is that maemo is an open platform while android, although it's linux, is not an open platform at all. I work in open source technologies (and a subcontractor for Nokia, so i've worked on Maemo for the last 2.5 years) so I know a bit more on the difference between the two. Android doesn't use an X server, you can't have anything other than java apps running on it, it just has a linux kernel behind it, but that's it.. and Google is known to do a lot of stuff on their own, never contribute back to the open source world, or they contribute stuff that nobody but them can use, etc.. while maemo is very open.

Nokia even goes as far as to give you all the documents and tools you need to build a new distribution for the phone and the tools to create your own firmware image and flash your N900 with your own distro (There's the "Mer" distro for internet tablets for example). You get root access as well as the 'xterm' application installed right out of the box, on the official firmware.. for android, you usually need to use some hacks just to get that root access.

Also, what I liked the most is that for example, I ported aMSN on the N900 (http://www.amsn-project.net/maemo-downloads.php) and all I had to do is something like this (on my debian system) :

kakaroto% apt-get source amsn
kakaroto% scratchbox
scratchbox% cd amsn-0.98.1 
scratchbox% dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

and I got myself a fully working, no porting needed, aMSN deb to install on my N900, scp, ssh, dpkg -i, and I ran aMSN. (note, I also had to do the exact same with the packages tcl8.5, tk8.5 and tcltls, which also worked without any porting necessary).

I'm sure I can't do this on an Android phone.. not only, would it not be as simple as that, but I think I couldn't even run my favorite app on android because it's a Tcl/Tk application, not a Java application, and because Android doesn't have an X server, etc...

It's this kind of power that allows the N900 to have such awesome applications, anything existing on your desktop can run on your Maemo device! Just for this reason, I am happy to say that I would never exchange a Maemo device against any Android device.

Sorry for the long post, I got carried away

p.s: humm... should I try to build open-remote-play for the N900?...

Hi again,
For those interested, here's a build of Open remote play running on the N900 : http://kakaroto.homelinux.net/~kakaroto/n900/orp/

just follow the instructions... I didn't bother creating a .deb, so just scp those files somewhere on your N900 (like /opt/orp) and run /opt/orp/orpui directly through xterm or using ssh.

It works, but it seems that the rendering with the SDL is extremely CPU hungry so it's slower than bearable, not usable at all actually... The UI also needs some work. I had to disable the bitrate setting in the profile edition page, because it didn't fit in the resolution of the screen, and there was no scrollbar, so it was impossible to save the ip address of the ps3.

The input key bindings also need to be changed since they refer to non existing keys on the N900 keyboard (F1/F2/F3/F4/Escape/etc..). I tried to take a screencast, but it didn't work because the screencast couldn't capture the rendered frames, it just showed a green frame instead of what I was seeing.

I hope others will get the motivation to improve this. Enjoy!