Hack a Day » wiifit

Wii Fit Balance Board controls robot

Juan Aguilar — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:20:00 +0000

More Wii Fit Balance Board hacks keep rolling in from Europe. We’re not sure we agree with [Juan Gonzales]‘s assertion that the Wii Fit Balance board is the best way to control robots, but we can’t deny how fun it looks. [Gonzales] managed to control a robot of his own design with the balance board, making it turn when he leans to the sides and moving forward and back when he leans in those directions.

The robot, which he calls SkyBot, is fairly impressive in its own right, built from a PIC microcontroller and featuring various infrared sensors and 6 contact sensors. The robot’s OS can be controlled from Windows, OS X, or Linux, but for this project, they used Debian. The balance board interfaces with a laptop connected to SkyBot; custom software (tar.gz file) to make this work was written in python, and is available on [Gonzales]‘s robot wiki, as well as instructions on how to build a SkyBot. It is in Spanish, however, so fire up Google Translate and get to work.

[via Balance Board Blog]

Wii Fit World of Warcraft

Juan Aguilar — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:15:00 +0000

By now you’ve probably seen the video of two researchers from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) navigating through maps on Google Earth by using the Wii Fit Balance Board. They’ve gone even further now by using the board to navigate World of Warcraft. It’s obvious that the board is usable with any 3D environment. The hack is entirely software based, as the board is completely unmodified. It relays data to a laptop via Bluetooth, where the pressure data in converted to directional instructions by their custom app written in C#. No notes on the project are available on DFKI’s site, but we’re betting they’ll release the software to the public once all the kinks are worked out.

[via Balance Board Blog]

Best of the rest

Eliot — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:45:00 +0000

Here are some more stories from today that we found interesting:

First Wii Fit hack: Control Google Earth
New Android UI demoed
Google opens App Engine
Windows 7 demoed, multitouch ducttaped in
Mac security update released
Hacker scripts $50000 in microdeposits
Displacements shows history of white washed room
Biggest drawing in world was a hoax