More on ControllerMate and the Frisby keyboard

 controllermate, frisby, os x, ps3, sixaxis, sony  Comments Off on More on ControllerMate and the Frisby keyboard
May 162008
 

ControllerMate showed me something interesting about the Frisby keyboard: The keyboard actually reports itself as two separate USB devices, a keyboard and a mouse. I suppose that this isn’t terribly surprising considering that the keyboard includes a scroll wheel. What is a little surprising is that all of the 20-odd buttons around the edges of the keyboard are tied to the mouse device. (The standard function keys are tied to the keyboard device.) The strange thing is that some of the mouse buttons still work after the Mac sleeps, but most don’t. The scrollwheel still works, for instance. This is one funky keyboard. But it works well, I like it, and it was really cheap on eBay.

I plugged my PS3’s SIXAXIS controller into the Mac to see if ControllerMate could see it. Yes, CM does, and it sees all the buttons and even the tilt sensors. But CM doesn’t see any of the button presses from the controller. According to people on the CM forum, this is likely because the controller is both USB and BlueTooth, and it is still paired with the PS3 overall; the Mac needs to send some sort of handshake signal to the controller to get it talking over USB.

 Posted by at 9:26 AM