How to get your gamepad to the PC in the other room
Seven concrete situations, with what each one needs and what it cannot do. If your case is here, the answer is right under the heading.
Almost everyone arrives with the same scene: the PC is in the study or the bedroom, the sofa is in the living room, and there is a wall in between. The pad’s cable is three metres long and the hallway is ten.
There are two ways to fix it, and it is worth knowing which one you need before installing anything. One brings the game’s PICTURE to where you are. The other brings the PAD to where the game is. ChimpDeck does the second.
The concrete cases are below. Each one says what it needs and, when the right answer is a different tool, it says that too.
How to use your PC gamepad from the living room
Plug the pad into a phone, tablet or Android TV box you already have in the living room; that device acts as the server and sends the pad to the PC over your local network. On the PC, the pad shows up as if it were plugged in there.
The typical scene is this: the PC is in another room and is already visible where it needs to be — either because you play on its monitor, or because it is already wired to the television over HDMI — and the only missing piece is getting the pad to it.
For that you do not need to run a USB cable down the hallway, buy a ten-metre active extender, or give up the pad you already like. What you need is an Android device you already have in the living room that supports USB OTG.
The pad goes into the Android device over USB, the USB traffic travels across your local network to the PC, and there Windows sees an ordinary USB device and loads its official driver. The game needs to know nothing: as far as it is concerned, the pad is plugged in.
What you need
A USB gamepad, or a wireless pad with its USB receiver.
A device running Android 8.0 or later with USB OTG: phone, tablet or television box.
A Windows PC on the same local network.
No root, no ADB, and no cable between the Android device and the PC.
Gamepad to the PC over Wi-Fi: what it actually needs
What it needs is a local network, not Wi-Fi specifically. The pad still connects by cable to the Android device; what travels across the network — over Wi-Fi or over Ethernet — is the USB traffic between that device and the PC.
It is worth clearing up the misunderstanding first, because it saves a purchase: ChimpDeck does not turn a wired pad into a wireless one. The only cable still in play is the short one, from the pad to the Android device sitting next to you on the sofa.
The long stretch, the one that crosses the house, is the one from the Android device to the PC, and that one is network. It can be Wi-Fi or it can be cable: the system does not care, and on a television box wired over Ethernet it works exactly the same. Wi-Fi is not a requirement.
While a session is live, the app puts the Android device’s Wi-Fi into low-latency mode, which is what software can do from its side. What it cannot do is promise a figure: latency depends on your network, your pad and your PC. That is why the app measures it with a clock synchronised between both devices and shows it with its margin of error, in your home, instead of publishing a shop-window number.
What it does and does not do
Yes: the pad reaches the PC with no long cable, across your local network.
Yes: it works over Ethernet, with no Wi-Fi at all.
No: the pad does not become wireless. It stays plugged into the Android device.
No: there is no published latency figure, because it depends on your setup.
How to pass a USB gamepad over the network to a Windows PC
With a USB-over-IP transport: the USB device is “exported” from the machine it is plugged into and “imported” on the PC, which treats it as local. ChimpDeck does that with its own USB/IP-compatible implementation, from an Android app to a Windows client.
The technique is called USB-over-IP and it is not new: it wraps USB bus traffic inside a network connection, so the destination computer believes the device is plugged into one of its own ports. Because it genuinely believes it, it loads the manufacturer’s official driver, and everything that depends on that driver — rumble included — keeps working.
ChimpDeck’s implementation is its own and built clean-room, with a core written in Rust; the protocol is known through behavioural analysis, not by copying anyone’s code. What it adds over a generic USB-over-IP is that it is built around the gamepad: all four rumble motors are driven from the phone, there are tools to diagnose the pad itself, and the interface is driven with the D-pad.
And it adds one more thing that in general tools is usually left to the user: the link between the Android device and the PC is encrypted end to end with the Noise protocol, on its own port, on out of the box and with nothing to configure. The two devices recognise each other on their own the first time they meet on the local network.
The five links in the chain
The gamepad, over USB.
The Android device, acting as the server.
Your local network, over Wi-Fi or wired.
The Windows PC, acting as the client.
The game, which sees an ordinary USB pad.
Using an NVIDIA Shield or an Android TV box as the gamepad server
It works the same as on a phone, and it is the scenario the living-room interface was built for: the whole app is driven with the pad’s D-pad, with no mouse, no keyboard and no touchscreen.
For this purpose a television box running Android is a better device than a phone: it is already in the living room, already switched on, already on the network — often by cable — and nobody carries it off to another room halfway through a session.
The usual problem with Android apps on a television is that they are designed for fingers. Not this one: on a tablet the interface switches to a side rail, and in the living room you navigate all of it with the D-pad of the pad already in your hand. A touchscreen is not a requirement.
Neither is Wi-Fi. A box wired over Ethernet is fine, and is in fact the steadier of the two connections. And since autostart can be left on for when the device boots or when the pad is plugged in, the box ends up behaving like an accessory of the PC: it switches on and it is already serving.
What the box needs
Android 8.0 or later.
USB OTG. This is the thing to check before anything else.
A free USB port for the pad or its receiver.
A local network. Ethernet is fine, and works well.
Getting an Xbox or PlayStation pad to the PC through your phone
Any USB gamepad works: Xbox, PlayStation, Switch Pro or third party. They reach the PC with their official driver, because Windows sees them as USB devices, and rumble travels back from the game to the pad.
What reaches the PC is not an imitation of the pad, nor a generic virtual pad: it is the pad. That is why Windows loads whichever official driver applies and the game identifies it for what it is, with its buttons where they belong.
Rumble makes the return trip too: the game sends it to the client, the client sends it to the Android device, and the Android device applies it on the pad. On pads with trigger motors, such as Xbox ones, all four motors are driven, and motors, patterns and modes can be controlled from the phone even with the Windows client minimised to the tray.
If one particular game does not recognise your pad, that is a different and earlier problem than the network: local gamepad translation programs such as DS4Windows fix it, and they can live alongside ChimpDeck without getting in each other’s way, because to Windows the pad arriving over the network is just another USB pad.
An alternative to VirtualHere when what you want to share is a gamepad
VirtualHere is general-purpose USB-over-IP and shares almost any device. ChimpDeck only does gamepads, and in exchange it brings pad diagnostics, rumble control from the phone, a living-room interface and end-to-end encryption on by default.
If what you need to share across the network is a printer, a licence dongle, a MIDI instrument or a wheel with pedals, the right tool is a general USB-over-IP — VirtualHere, or the native USB/IP in Linux — and ChimpDeck does not even attempt it.
If what you need is a gamepad, the specialisation shows in things a general tool has no reason to carry: a button tester, stick drift and dead zone, trigger curve, a reaction test, four-motor rumble driven from the Android device, nicknames per pad, several pads with filters, and an exportable session summary.
There is one limit worth being clear about before deciding: ChimpDeck has a Windows client only, and none is planned for Linux or macOS. If the destination computer is anything else, the general alternative is the right answer.
Do I need streaming, or is passing the pad enough?
If you want to see the game’s picture on the living-room screen, you need streaming (Steam Link, Moonlight with Sunshine, Parsec). If the screen is already where it should be and the only missing piece is the pad, passing the pad is enough.
This is the question that saves the most time, and almost nobody asks it before installing. The two families of tools sound the same but move different things: one moves compressed video, the other moves a device.
Streaming is what you want if the PC monitor is in another room and you have no way to see it. Passing the pad is what you want if the PC is already wired to the television over HDMI, or if you play looking at its monitor and the only awkward part is the length of the pad’s cable.
They are not mutually exclusive, and in fact bringing the PC picture to the living room by integrating Moonlight and Sunshine is on the list of what is coming. But today ChimpDeck carries no picture, and saying so plainly beats letting someone find out after installing.
If your case is not here
Write and tell us. The guides on this page come from real questions, and a question that has not been answered is a guide that is missing.