Kodi and SNES30 (bluetooth) not working

Question

I've got retropie 3.8 installed with kodi running

I've installed kodi via:

1. sudo apt-get update

2. sudo apt-get install kodi (currently 15.2)

3. identified controller via cat /proc/bus/input/devices (8BitDo SNES30 GamePad)

4. defined new joystick.xml under /home/pi/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/ with the same name and basic mappings e.g.

<keymap>
<global>
    <joystick name="8BitDo SNES30 GamePad">
    <button id="1">Select</button>
    <button id="0">Back</button>
    <axis id="1" limit="-1">Up</axis>
    <axis id="1" limit="+1">Down</axis>
    <axis id="2" limit="-1">Left</axis>
    <axis id="2" limit="+1">Right</axis>
  </joystick>
</global>
</keymap>

5. start Kodi (sudo kodi)

6. Joystick isn't registered

If I look at the kodi.log under /home/pi/.kodi/temp/ I can see that SNES30 is attempting to be mapped via dev/input/event3 which is not right (it should be js0)

Answer 1

Good news: I've almost got it working. It turns out that v3.8 of retropie (with upgraded settings) only includes 15.2 of Kodi with joysticks not compiled in it. Current apt-get didn't have any newer versions of Kodi and so I:

1. Add experimental repository of Kodi for raspbian (currently 16.1)

echo 'deb http://pipplware.pplware.pt/pipplware/dists/jessie/main/binary /' | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pipplware_jessie.list

2. Add repository key

wget -O - http://pipplware.pplware.pt/pipplware/key.asc | sudo apt-key add -

3. Update apt-get

sudo apt-get update

4. Uninstall old kodi

sudo apt-get remove kodi

5. Install new kodi

sudo apt-get install kodi

This rendition of kodi includes joystick support. the joystick map mostly works although the next conundrum is that only left/down currently works even though it should work - the other button mappings work fine, though.