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Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB

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Hi HN! I built Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay, a tool that lets Bluetooth devices (like keyboards and mice) connect to USB-only hosts using a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Why? My friend needed a way to use his Bluetooth mouse and keyboard on a PC with Bluetooth disabled due to policy restrictions. This tool acts as a bridge, relaying Bluetooth input over USB. It also lets you use Bluetooth peripherals with older devices that only support USB input.

Tech: Written in Go, optimized for Raspberry Pi Zero W.

I love HN’s community and often lurk here—I’m hoping this project is useful or at least sparks some interesting discussions. Feedback and contributions are welcome!

This solves a huge annoyance I've had: swap a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse between multiple laptops, without manually un0paring / re-pairing. I have a personal "hot desk" at home. I want to be able to plug in any laptop to the large monitor, and have the wireless keyboard/mouse on that desk instantly work. And when I leave the desk with my laptop, I don't want that keyboard/mouse connected anymore.

This has been impossible so far, because even USB bluetooth dongles still require each host computer to pair (and un-pair) with the keyboard/mouse.

I am going to try your solution, and I will plug the USB input into the large monitor on my desk. Then any laptop that plugs into that monitor should have access to the wireless keyboard/mouse. Thank you for creating and sharing this!

9 days agoby reeddavid

This is brilliant! It just shows what can be done with the raspberry pi and other small computers, and some time! I love seeing stuff like this and the like. BlueSCSI is another example. If you think outside the box, the pi can act as a DPU, to an extent, for machines. It can already act as a KVM… and the PiKVM project has the option of mounting storage to the host, and even networking. Very cool stuff!

9 days agoby tiernano

Cool stuff! Actually that tempts me to start a new rabbit hole research: could we do BT -> Internet -> BT. I would have so many uses to that.

9 days agoby imhoguy

A potential use case for this is using BT-only peripherals, like Apple Magic Trackpad/keyboard, with KVM/USB switches.

Would this work? I’d buy one. I currently have to use Synergy to share peripherals between two MacBooks.

9 days agoby threecheese

Nice. Check out this guys repos for stuff using nrf chips. It’s generally the other way round. Really nice. https://github.com/gdsports/ble-usb-devices

https://github.com/gdsports/usbhostcopro

9 days agoby willwade

This is a wonderful hack!

But — using a Raspberry Pi and Linux is overkill for this. It introduces huge unnecessary complexity. A simpler approach would be to go with Zephyr and a small microcontroller (ARM Cortex M4).

9 days agoby jwr

Cool project!

Out of curiosity, do you think this concept could be extended to other common bluetooth use cases, such as wireless headphones/speakers, or file transfers over bluetooth to mobile devices, or are the audio/file transfer/etc stacks too far removed from the HID stack for that to cleanly translate?

9 days agoby anonym29

Ooh, one thing that can be very useful for this is sending USB wakeup packets. I have an HTPC under my TV and game controllers (PS4, Xbox) at my coffee table and there is no way to wake up the PC with those over Bluetooth so I have to keep it on and idling at all times, wasting electricity.

9 days agoby 76SlashDolphin

9 days agoby grnnja

Damned, I just purchased a new keyboard with a 2.4 GHz dongle because my Bluetooth keyboard cannot with GRUB and I got tired of having to plug it in every time I rebooted.

What a cool little project. I might build a couple of these for the KVMs at work.

9 days agoby fffrantz

This is very cool. I have a Kinesis Freestyle2 Blue for Mac that keep having repeating key issue when paired with my Macbook. The Kinesis CS unhelpfully blame Apple's BT stack implementation and offered no solution. I never had issues with the keyboard when connected to a Linux machine, so this will work nicely for my home office setup!

I'm assuming this also works with Pi Zero 2 W? (The repo only mention the original Zero W)

9 days agoby tanvach

This is awesome! I have some serial devices (RS 232) that I've wished I could make wireless. Are there any similar projects to bluetooth serial comms?

9 days agoby waiquoo