Thanks for taking a look at it!
I hadn’t realized that pitch and roll were generated by motedaemon (and not directly supplied by the wiimote). It makes sense now that you mention it!

I’m going to try a bit more powerful weapon (airsoft handgun) thoough it’s too heavy for horizontal & vertical motion.

I only have the two servos but once I get something a bit more threatening (and a remote trigger) I’ll try to do X & Y trackig w/ maybe a laser pointer or something!

With this, it should be easy to add an up/down control by using the wiimote’s pitch. The only rotational motion missing is yaw, but the wiimote doesn’t have the hardware to handle that.

http://blog.thecapacity.org/2009/01/16/build-your-own-iogun/

I’m really intrigued by your 1st idea too. I did feel like I should be able to extrapolate from more then a single axis and was considering adding an “up / down” output as well.

However, the vector math was a bit daunting for me, and suggestions?

Another idea you may want to consider, is to mount the Wiimote on the coilgun. You could then paint the target with a IR laser, and use the Wiimote’s IR sensor to track the target. This way, you don’t need to be at the computer to aim it using a webcam.

@kevin Proximity detector’s a good idea but I think I’m going to go for a webcam. Once I get my relay board for the trigger I’ll put the two together and see if that works!

The wiimote output is crazy! The WiiMote daemon I used spits out the data constantly, and I learned (from watching the data) that accelerometers aren’t all that “perfect”!

You’ll get a value say 124 and it’ll ficker b/t 119, 128 and maybe a few others (and these are all floating points too!).

Also it makes sense once I saw it but if you move the wiimote, say left, you’ll see a spike in #’s but hold steady for a second and it’ll look like it never moved! (This is because accelerometers can only track inertia and that’s why there’s an IR sensor too).

I have a new found respect for all the math behind it all! If your program blinks for a second you could have missed a movement! And I have no clue how to extrapolate 3 axes into something simple like a “gesture” for now!

Anyway, it sounds like maybe you’ve got enough to try more of a mechanical system and if you’ve got some good servos maybe use them to wind a trebuchet, crossbow / windlass or something!

Or if you can gear it up how ’bout one of those centripetal acceleration cranes like they use for pumpkin’chunk’n!

I think I saw an image recognition hack on here maybe a year ago where a guy could shoot his buddy w/ a paintball gun!

Good luck w/ the nokia, but if it’s too tough a wiimote’s pretty cheap for all that it does (think about all those buttons! ;> ) and let me know if you want some ideas (as you said from my site, I’m full of ‘em ;> )

@tapius & @marco Yea it wasn’t my favorite class either!

@will_d., @mike_c & @Cyrozap isn’t it fun!? There’s a great TED talk where they show a student video talking about how violence is being made more like games!

http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/will_video_game.php

i’ve actually been mucking around with building a small gun turret type thing myself; so far I have a heap of servos twitching on my desk and no actual firing mechanism. i hadn’t thought about using any remote control method more exciting than the keys on a keyboard, but i have a nokia phone with an accelerometer which i think somebody has written python libraries for, so i may have a go at hooking something up using the output of that in lieu of a wiimote.

there’s definitely something intriguing about allowing computers to shoot at things. eventually i’d like to have some kind of automatic aiming/firing – through work I have access to some pretty decent real-time face detection and recognition software, and i don’t think it’d really take too much effort to knock something together using that to shoot at unknown faces :)

will definitely check back to see how your project is doing, hopefully mine will get off the ground (well, desk) at some point too.

dan