Features

Battery gauge

The main dashboard shows an arc-shaped gauge (Gauge.jsx, SVG-based) with the battery percentage, connection icon (USB or Bluetooth), and a charging indicator when plugged in. Fill color follows the controller’s charge state: green above 70%, yellow above 30%, red below that, sky-blue while charging, regardless of percentage. The tray icon mirrors these exact same thresholds and colors in a separately hand-drawn 32×32 version, so the two never disagree.

When no controller is connected, the gauge is empty and a neutral status pill reads “No controller connected” underneath it.

Lightbar & rumble

An expandable panel (ColorPicker.jsx), shown only while a controller is connected:

Color: R/G/B sliders (0-255 each), plus six one-tap presets (PS Blue, Soft Red, Green, Pink, Amber, Pure White).
Brightness: a separate 0-100% slider applied as a multiplier on top of the chosen RGB before it’s sent to the controller, so brightness and color stay independently adjustable.
Rumble: separate weak-motor and strong-motor sliders (0-255 each), for previewing haptics outside of any game.

Every slider drag sends an update immediately, throttled through a small queue (at most one in-flight set_output_state call at a time, a 10ms gap between sends) so rapid dragging can’t flood the controller with overlapping HID writes. The last-sent color and rumble values are cached on the Rust side and automatically re-applied the moment a controller (re)connects, so unplugging and replugging, or switching a controller from USB to Bluetooth, doesn’t reset the lightbar to its default color.

Device info

An info-icon modal (DeviceInfoModal.jsx) showing the connected controller’s model (v1 vs v2, detected from its USB product ID), and its raw vendor/product ID in hex, read directly over HID.

Tray icon & tray behavior

The system tray icon is a live battery gauge, redrawn roughly once a second directly in Rust (see architecture.md), not a static icon swapped between a few fixed states. Hovering it shows a tooltip with the exact percentage, connection type, and a charging indicator.

Two independent settings control tray behavior:

Show Tray Icon: whether the tray icon exists at all. Turning it off also force-disables “Minimize to Tray” below, since there’d be nowhere to minimize to.
Minimize to Tray: when enabled, closing the main window hides it to the tray instead of quitting the app; quitting is then only possible from the tray icon’s right-click menu.

Under Settings → General:

Start with Windows: registers the app to launch automatically at login (via a Windows Registry Run key entry).
Launch Minimized (shown only once the above is on): when enabled, an autostart-triggered launch stays hidden in the tray instead of showing the window. A normal, manual launch (double-clicking the app or its Start Menu shortcut) always shows the window regardless of this setting. See architecture.md for how this is actually implemented, and bugs-and-quirks.md for why it originally didn’t work.

Mouse & stick emulation (experimental)

Under Settings → Emulation, two independent, optional ways to drive the OS mouse cursor from the controller, useful for basic navigation without switching to a mouse:

Touchpad Mouse: dragging a finger on the DS4’s touchpad moves the cursor by the same relative delta (large single-tick jumps, e.g. from a finger lifting and landing elsewhere, are filtered out so they don’t teleport the cursor). A touchpad click is forwarded as a left mouse click.
Joystick Mouse: right-stick deflection past a small deadzone moves the cursor continuously, scaled down from the stick’s raw range so it’s controllable rather than twitchy.

Both work by reading the same HID reports already being polled for battery status, so enabling them adds no extra hardware polling.

Auto-updates

DS4 Dashboard checks for new versions on its own. Under Settings → About:

On startup: the app quietly asks GitHub whether a newer version exists. This only ever fetches a small text file describing the latest version, never a full download, and never shows anything on screen unless there’s actually something new. This happens once when the app first opens, and again any time it’s been fully closed and reopened, but not just from minimizing to the tray and reopening the window (the app is still running the whole time in that case, so nothing needs re-checking).
If an update exists: a small inline row appears in the About tab (not a popup) with the new version number, a Download button, and a View on GitHub link that opens that release’s page in your normal web browser.
Downloading only starts when Download is clicked, with a progress bar while it happens.
The moment a download finishes, while the app is actively open in front of you, an “Update ready to install” popup (a “modal”: a small window that sits on top of the rest of the app until answered) appears on its own, with Install Now and Install Later buttons.
Installing: Windows requires closing a running program before it can replace that program’s own file on disk, a limitation of Windows itself, not a choice this app makes. Clicking Install Now therefore closes DS4 Dashboard, installs in the background with a small progress window, and reopens the app automatically, all within a few seconds.
Choosing Install Later, or simply closing the app before installing, does not lose the download as long as the app keeps running (including minimized to the tray). Fully quitting and reopening the app does lose it, but only in the sense that the app quietly checks again on that next launch and offers the same Download prompt, exactly as if nothing had been fetched yet. Nothing is ever installed without the “ready to install” popup appearing live in front of you first.

See architecture.md for how updates are verified as genuinely coming from this project before anything is ever installed.

Themes & app icons

Theme: light, dark, or “follow system,” toggled from the icon in the top-left corner; persisted across restarts. Colors are defined once per theme as CSS custom properties (src/theme.css) and referenced everywhere else via var(--...), so there’s a single source of truth per theme rather than scattered color literals.
App icon: several alternate taskbar/tray icon styles to choose from in Settings → General, swapped live without restarting the app.