Awesome, this is a pretty interesting way to take the wiimote to the next level.

Posted at 1:07 am on Jul 29th, 2007 by Ato

hot-rodding and spreadsheets–now there’s a fun match!

Posted at 1:50 am on Jul 29th, 2007 by jake of all trades

I wish I could download the information from the accelerometers built into my car stereo. I can measure HP and gravity forces (both accel/decel and turning) and it shows that on the screen, but it would be fun to actually see a graph of all of the data.

Posted at 2:32 am on Jul 29th, 2007 by Erik

A Nintendo DS could also be used for this purpose, with the DS motion pak / DS motion card (Available at http://ndsmotion.com/ ), along with a DLDI ( http://dldi.drunkencoders.com ) write capable flash device to fill the other slot. The software to load onto that flash device can be found at http://ds.caitsith2.net/NDSMotion%20Logger.zip

Posted at 6:47 am on Jul 29th, 2007 by CaitSith2

Hey! A vortex guy! Cool!

Posted at 9:23 am on Jul 29th, 2007 by Bruno

So, if you have start location, acceleration, braking and turning data, couldn’t you take that information and apply it to a map. Some Google maps api action could map your trip or give you your current location.

Posted at 11:57 am on Jul 29th, 2007 by Sp`ange

I’ve been waiting for this. This is cool!

@6: This is way too inaccurate to do that, but if you got really, really accurate accelerometers, then yes, that would work for short distances.

Posted at 12:21 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by David

@sp`ange: in theory, yes. in application, the ADXL330’s used in Wiimotes just isn’t that great. they are great for measuring general acceleration, but not precise enough to figure out position acceptably. the amount of error you get would be tremendous for trying to figure out position and such. multiple accelerometers in different locations working to get an “average” position or something would work much better.

course, you could try with just one wiimote and prove me wrong; I bet the error would make figuring out position and such very difficult.

Posted at 12:22 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by carlton

#6, in theory, yeah. But you have a lot of noise in that kind of data, and MEMs systems (like the accelerometer and gyros) tend to experience null drift – the ‘at rest’ level moves around (slowly). Null drift isn’t a problem on short time spans because the null level is approximately constant over short times, but over minutes or hours, you need a reference to re-zero your signal; that’s what the Wii light bar does. If you integrated all the data/errors to try to get a map of distance, I suspect you would end up with nothing but garbage.

Posted at 12:25 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by confuted

actually, yeah, I thought about that. it’s only one multiplication away to get distance calculations. but then i figured that people can just use GPS to get all that done.

Posted at 12:28 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by Kevin Lee

The 0-60 times it generated seem awfully slow for the two cars measured…

Posted at 3:25 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by Ted

Gah, I’ve been working on this very same idea but done properly. The wiimote is accurate enough to tally up with my gps so I’m assuming that there is just some cumulative error with his ‘high school physics’

Posted at 5:31 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by Ben

wouldn’t be too hard to position several wiimotes in the car to get more accurate readings. pitch, yaw, roll, etc… it would also require a better means of of securing the device to the car.

I’m only using the “G” values, which I presume are already post-processed. Someone else can use the rawaccel_ values for more accurate readings. The G values were just more convenient.

Posted at 6:47 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by Kevin Lee

mmm You would need 3 wouldn’t you but then it becomes cheaper to use a gyro in combination with the accelerometer.

Posted at 10:39 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by Ben

Hmmmm… How about using the Wiimote to control a dash-mounted motorized camera to make it “turn into” the curves?

Posted at 10:47 pm on Jul 29th, 2007 by ed3

The lame thing about this is that there are several other simpler, pure accelerometer chip devices you can already hook up to a computer to do this. This is a pretty bad way to go about taking these measurements, especially since using precision accelerometers is already cheap and easy. But good aplication of the Wii-mote none the less…

Posted at 12:34 am on Jul 30th, 2007 by Attack Gorilla

WOW!!! I’m not the only Vortex guy to read this! I feel better now.

Posted at 1:43 pm on Jul 30th, 2007 by chadz

Next thing you will be able to use the Wii remote to order pizza.

Posted at 12:01 am on Jul 31st, 2007 by nathan belomy

get a life your all sad

Posted at 7:14 am on Aug 7th, 2007 by a