A Kobo Remote for Cheapskates

I am a big fan of my Kobo Clara E-Reader. But sometimes the lack of buttons on the touchscreen are a little annoying. Rakuten has a bluetooth remote available now that is by all account quite lovely. Forward button, back button, nice materials, for the quite reasonable price of $29.99. But what if you don’t want to spend the unreasonable sum, or what if you want to get a bunch of remotes on the cheap? In that case, I have a solution for you. You can use the quite amazing kobo-btpt project, which allows the use of any Bluetooth HID device as remote source for your Kobo E-Reader. The only hard part is determining what bluetooth remote device to use.

I recommend using these cheapo camera shutter remotes, that you can find at Ebay, Walmart, AliExpress (see pic below). The listing here has 2 remotes for 8.99, which is kind of a saving of 85%! These remote shutters are intended to use with cellphones, where (fortunately for us), Iphone users need a shutter button that simulates volume down button presses, while Android users need a button that simulates volume up button presses. We can take advantage of this by using the big IOS (Volume Down) button as a Next Page button, and the smaller Android button for Prev Page.

Below are some instructions to get the kobo-btpt project working with your E-Reader.

1. Connect your cheap camera shutter to your phone via bluetooth, and write down what the name of the device is. For my remote shutter, this was the confusing text “AB Shutter3”
2. Delete the shutter connection from the list of paired devices, so your remote does not accidentally connect again when you want to read. Or stop here if you actually just want a phone camera shutter.
3. Download the latest KoboRoot.tgz file from the kobo-btpt releases.
4. Connect your Kobo to your PC, and copy the file KoboRoot.tgz to the directory .kobo, then unplug your Kobo.
5. Wait for your Kobo to reboot, and then connect it again
6. There will be a new .btpt folder on your Kobo, this is where we will configure our Bluetooth Camera shutter as a page turner.
7. Make a new file called “AB Shutter3” (Or whatever the bluetooth name of your camera shutter was) in this folder. Make sure to delete the extension if your PC added it!. Copy the contents from this section into the new file.
8. Disconnect your Kobo, and pair your camera shutter remote with your Kobo. It should start working as a page turner as soon as you open a book!

Contents of kobo-btpt config file for Camera shutter

The below contents work for me for the cheap camera shutter I linked above. Your mileage may vary. Especially the last 0 on each line below: This indicates the page turn command is interpretted when the camera shutter button is released. You may need to change this to a 1 for your device to get it working for you.

prevPage EV_KEY KEY_VOLUMEUP 0
nextPage EV_KEY KEY_VOLUMEDOWN 0

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