Wii Remote demonstration
19 Dec 2010I decided to purchase a Wii Remote to do some small gaming projects in my spare time. The Wii has been around for four years now and it usually comes with the Wii Sports game (I especially enjoyed playing the bowling game with a group of 4 players). Using a PC running GNU/Linux one can communicate with the Wii Remote using the software packages wmgui and wminput. I’ve made a small demonstration video.
The Wii Remote has a 3-axis accelerometer, an IR camera with a microcontroller producing the coordinates of the 10 brightest dots, and several buttons (arrows, A, B, -, Home, +, 1, and 2). Furthermore there are 4 LEDs and a rumble motor. The device uses the Bluetooth standard for wireless communication.
Note that more recently Nintendo started shipping the Wii MotionPlus which adds two gyroscopes for measuring the rotational speed along two axes.
Update: I released the first version of my Ruby bindings for the CWiid library.
Update: I released a Ruby implementation of Johnny Chung Lee’s WiiMote Whiteboard
See also: