Bluefruit LE Shield talking to Joycons

[neromir]

I recently picked up the Bluefruit LE Shield (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2746) in the hopes of trying to get a gamepad (specifically a pair of Nintendo Switch Joycons) to send button press info over to the Arduino. However, while doing some preliminary testing, I ran across some info that makes me think it's not going to work, and I'd like to just confirm and maybe get some suggestions on what to try next.

So, if I read the FAQ properly, this shield can't act as a host; I'm pretty certain the Joycons will want to act as peripheral devices, and as such they won't be able to talk to the LE Shield. Is that correct?

If that's true, any suggestions on what I could use to get some Joycons to talk to my arduino? I have an Arduino Mega 2560 and would prefer to stick with Arduino just to keep the amount of code I'm going to have to rework to a minimum, but at this point I'm open to just about any suggestion. I've also seen people using USB host shields and bluetooth dongles to achieve this, but I'm having a hard time finding any USB host shields anywhere...

Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated!

[adafruit_support_carter]

I think the show stopper here is that the Joycons use "classic" Bluetooth. The LE in Bluetooth LE is "low energy", which is like a subset of the full "classic" Bluetooth spec. In general, BLE devices can not talk to classic Bluetooth devices.

Wish this weren't the case. Would be really fun to be able to use those controllers in projects.

A Raspberry Pi might be able to talk to them, since it has full Bluetooth support, not just BLE.

[neromir]

Ok, thanks for the response! I was also worried about the BLE vs regular Bluetooth situation but hadn't gotten that far yet. I'll look into the Raspberry Pi situation and see if that's going to be feasible for what I'm planning to do.