One of the coolest things about the tinkering community is that, if you have a problem connecting two pieces of hardware together, they've likely already figured out a way to bridge the two. It'll usually feature a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 that sits between the two, but whatever computing device they pick, you can be sure that it'll be cheap, easy to set up, and best of all, really useful at what it does.

Such is the case of this Raspberry Pi Pico 2W project, which makes a PC dongle for the PlayStation 5 controller that Sony never made. And while you can always use your PC's Bluetooth connection, this dongle adds back features you'd usually lose when going wireless.

This Raspberry Pi Pico 2W dongle does Sony controllers better than Sony

It's cheap, too

This cool project comes to our attention via SlaveKnightSoman on the Raspberry Pi subreddit. They were tired of having a subpar experience using their PS5 controller on their PC and decided to scour the internet for a solution. Sure enough, they managed to find the perfect fit:

I’ve spent way too much time trying to get the "PS5 Experience" on PC without being tethered by a 3 meter cable. Windows Bluetooth strips away the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers because it doesn't support the 4 channel audio bandwidth the DualSense requires.

I found a project that completely solves this by using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W as a hardware bridge.

The project they stumbled upon was DS5Dongle by awalol. This lets you turn an overclocked Pi Pico 2W into a makeshift PS5 wireless dongle, and because it's not using the standard Bluetooth channels, you get haptic feedback and triggers, too. So, SlaveKnightSoman got to work implementing it on their own board, and sure enough, it works like a charm. Check out the video above for proof that the more advanced features are present and working.