Pairing the Controller to your PC

The PS Move connects via two methods:

  • USB: Used for Bluetooth pairing; can set rumble and LEDs, cannot read sensors
  • Bluetooth: Used for wireless connectivity; can set rumble, LEDs and read sensors

Bluetooth pairing

The psmove pair utility is used for Bluetooth pairing – it will write the Bluetooth host address of the computer it’s running on to PS Move controllers connected via USB.

It optionally takes a single command-line parameter that is an alternative Bluetooth host address. For example, if you want to pair your PS Move controller to your phone, but it does not have USB Host Mode, you can use this on your PC:

./psmove pair aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

Where aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff is the Bluetooth host address of your phone. Note that depending on the phone, you also need to run pairing code there.

Depending on the operating system, you might need to run the utility as Administrator (Windows), enter your password (OS X) or run using sudo (Linux) to let the utility modify the system Bluetooth settings and whitelist the PS Move for connection.

Note

You only need to pair the controller to your PC once, from then on it will always try to connect to your PC. Only when you connect your controller to a PS3 or pair with another PC will you have to re-do the pairing process on your computer.

Connecting via Bluetooth

Unplug the USB cable and press the PS button on the controller. The red status LED will start blinking and should eventually remain lit to indicate a working Bluetooth connection. If it continues blinking, it might not be paired via Bluetooth, or - if you can see the connection on your computer - the battery is low and needs charging via USB or a charger. To verify the connection, check the Bluetooth devices list of your computer and see if there is an entry for “Motion Controller”.

On recent versions of OS X, a dialog might pop up asking for a PIN. Close it and pair the controller again using psmove pair. After that, it should connect successfully.

Troubleshooting

Here are some advanced tips if you can’t get pairing working out of the box:

Mac OS X

If psmove pair doesn’t work or you get a PIN prompt when you press the PS button on your controller, follow these steps:

  • Right after you run psmove pair write down the adress you find after “controller address:” in the form “aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff”
  • Disable Bluetooth (or the modifications that follow won’t work)
  • Wait for the Bluetooth process to quit (pgrep blued); repeat until nothing prints anymore (e.g. the process “blued” has quit) - this can take up to a minute
  • Authorize the controller’s MAC address: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth HIDDevices -array-add "<aa-bb-cc-dd-ee-ff>" (where <aa-bb-cc-dd-ee-ff> is the MAC address you wrote down at 8.2 but with hyphens for separators)
  • Enable Bluetooth again then press the PS button on the controller. The PIN request should not pop up this time and the Move should now appear in the bluetooth devices as “Motion Controller”.

Starting with macOS Sierra, at most 2 Move controllers can be connected via Bluetooth at the same time when using the built-in Bluetooth adapter. This is due to some internal changes Apple made and did work on the same hardware prior to updating to Sierra. If you need more controllers at the same time, you can use an external Bluetooth adapter.

Ubuntu Linux

If you wish to access the PSMove controller via USB or Bluetooth without requiring root-level permissions then it is necessary to copy the contrib/99-psmove.rules file to /etc/udev/rules.d/:

sudo cp contrib/99-psmove.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo udevadm trigger

Windows

You might have to try pairing multiple times for the Bluetooth connection to work on Windows. Also, be sure to use the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack and do not install any third party drivers (e.g. MotionInJoy) that would interfere with proper operation of PS Move API on Windows.

Pocket C.H.I.P

During testing, we found that pairing a PS Move via USB works fine in a Pocket C.H.I.P with its battery. On a C.H.I.P (the board, without the battery, just connected via a MicroUSB charger) we noticed that sometimes the PS Move seems to draw too much power from USB, causing the C.H.I.P to reboot. In this case, you can pair your controller with the C.H.I.P in the Pocket C.H.I.P shell and then remove the C.H.I.P and just power it up and connect via Bluetooth only.

If you do not have a Pocket C.H.I.P, and just a C.H.I.P, you can pair the controller on your workstation (Linux, macOS, Windows) and then register the controller using psmove register.