Control your wiimote using WPF (no wii needed)

I'm sure almost everyone knows about the Nintendo wii. It uses a different type of controller that is a real ingenious piece of equipment. The controller is the wiimote that has some awesome sensors in it. Much more detailed information can be found at the WiiLi Wiki. There are links that describe what type of sensors the wiimote has and how it works. There are also links that describe the data the the wiimote passes to the wii.

Now that's one cool input device if you ask me, but what does this wiimote do for us? Well, since it is a bluetooth device you can connect this guy to you computer pretty easily; all you need is a bluetooth adapter or built in bluetooth on your computer. Once connected you can use some programming language to interrupt the data that the wiimote sends to the computer. Brian Peek has written a nifty managed library for the wiimote that I have used (at the time of writing this I am using version 1.2.0.0). He also lists other projects that are using his library; some really cool ones at that. And of course, the guy who has started this phenomenon is Johnny Chung! Thanks to everyone for putting together their projects so I could learn and finally create one of my own ... and yes, there will be more to come.

So for this first part in my wiimote application, I have built a wiimote status app using wpf. My application lets the user connect to the wiimote and it displays a lot of data that the wiimote is telling the computer; mainly its IR coordinates, accelerometer data, button states and extension status. You can also use my application to toggle the LED's and the rumble feature on the wiimote. To get valid IR coordinates (and some round circles to move on the application) you need to point the wiimote at some IR light source. Incandescent light bulbs will work as well, or even the actual wiimote sensor bar! Speaking of the sensor bar, I built my own version using some IR LED's similar to this one. However, there were some difficulties in putting the final product into the casing I had and in the end I broke an LED, so my homemade sensor bar is sitting in a bad currently.

Hopefully you will enjoy this project and all that it has to offer. It really was a good introductory to learning how to use the managed library and to better understand the wiimote. I know there has been talk about tracking multiple points using the wiimote and Matthias Shapiro is currently looking into this using wpf as well. Check out his wii data visualizer, he has some great ideas on how to show some of the wii data!

There seems to be plenty of people out there that are starting to use the wiimote as a great input device. If you have any questions or thoughts about what projects I should try to accomplish, let me know. And let me know what you think about my application as well!