WiiMote + iPhone

posted Aug 5th 2009 8:12am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: cellphones hacks, iphone hacks, wii hacks

Yo dawg, we heard you liked accelerometers… Apparently people have been wanting this for a while. We’re not completely sure why, so we’ll wait and see what gets done with it. [Ubiq_01] has connected a WiiMote to his iPhone and is using it to control and OpenGL application. He has released a tutorial (which seems to be down currently) if you want to try to reproduce it yourself.

[via Makezine]

15 ton robotic arm + WiiMote

posted Jul 8th 2009 6:55am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: robots hacks, wii hacks

These 15 ton robotic arms can reach 16 meters. Not content to control them by a simple joystick, the team hacked together WiiMote controls for them. Ok, we get it. Everybody loves the Wii.  What is different about using the WiiMote in this scenario? You can see that they are only using the pitch, yaw, and roll. They’re not utilizing the tracking aspects at all. The only difference between the WiiMote and their joystick in this scenario is that the WiiMote connects via bluetooth. Frankly, we just like the fact that people are playing with the robotic arms, WiiMote or not.




Tennis practice for hackers

posted Jul 6th 2009 7:29am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: wii hacks

wiimotetennis2

Here’s an interesting WiiMote based project. [Mans] is a tennis fan, though a bit out of practice. With the tennis season coming to a rather climactic end, he got excited and wanted to brush up on his skills. He found the toss part of his serve to be very sloppy. Being a hacker, the first thing he thought was that there must be some way of tracking and graphing his toss so that he could improve it in an intelligent and controlled manner. The WiiMote seemed a perfect fit for this. Only a small modification was necessary, an external button wired to the internal “-” button. This switch is active while he’s holding the ball, and inactive when the ball is released. In this manner, he can track and chart his toss to find out exactly where he needs improvement.  He uses [Johnny Chung Lee]’s code, with a small but unspecified modification to write the accelerometer data to a text file.

As he points out, this could be very usefull for any repetitive movement. Whith accelerometers getting cheaper and cheaper, there’s nothing stopping you from using multiple ones either. Imagine a golf rig to analyze your swing, Maybe a boxing rig that measured your hip twist and arm extension, or possibly a yoyo glove to tell you if your flick needs some help. Great job [Mans].

Wii Balance board

posted Jun 28th 2009 8:27am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks, wii hacks

[Matt Cutts], head developer for google’s anti spam team, describes how to attach a Wii balance board to a linux computer. He even shows how to make a GUI to show the input. The entire project is done in about 200 lines of python.The process assumes that you can already make a bluetooth connection to a WiiMote, but if you can’t, he’s got instructions for that too.

[via hackawii]

Wii MotionPlus + Arduino

posted Jun 23rd 2009 11:26am by Zach Banks
filed under: arduino hacks, nintendo hacks, wii hacks

wiimoteplus

[knuckles904] was able to use the new Wii MotionPlus with an Arduino. Nintendo has released the WM+ in order to detect the motion of the controller better. The Wiimote only detects acceleration, whereas the WM+ detects rotation along 3 axes. The Arduino communicates with it over I2C, the same protocol that is used with the Nunchuk. To connect the two devices, he used jumper wires, but breakout boards are also available. He was able to create some example code with help from wiibrew.org. When paired with a Nunchuk, which contains a 3-axis accelerometer, you can have a 6 degrees-of-freedom IMU for under $40, perfect for controlling your robots or logging data.

[via adafruit]




Magic wands for Disney

posted May 17th 2009 8:30am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, led hacks, wireless hacks

MAGIC

[NRP] sent us a few of his projects. The most notable of the bunch was a school project funded by Disney. They were to make some kind of interactive entertainment for people waiting in line for rides. They decided on a wand style interface. Each wand has an accelerometer, an IR LED for tracking, an XBee unit, and a few buttons for interaction. They wrote some custom games and a multi person white board to test it all out.  You can see those in action, along with a space themed pong game in the video after the break. Even though this was funded by Disney, you can still find all the source code and schematics, available for free.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wiitar, a build log

posted Apr 17th 2009 6:30am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, home entertainment hacks, wii hacks

wiitar

[Ozan] sent in this build log from when he made a Wiitar. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s a guitar combined with a wiimote. He has completely gutted the Wiimote and installed the internals in the guitar. Some toggle switches were mounted to control the button states on the Wiimote.  This is a pretty useful setup as you can use the Wiimote data to control effects on the guitar. We’ve actually seen a very similar setup before. [Ozan] has included the build log, as well as a simple glovepie script and a sample effect patch.

Wiimote controlled Hexapods

posted Apr 5th 2009 8:28am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: robots hacks, wii hacks

The Phoenix is a very impressive hexapod robot platform. It has 18 servos which gives each leg 3 degrees of freedom and a BasicAtom Pro 28 for the brains. Interestingly, the design started as a personal project of a forum member on the Lynxmotion forums. It turned out so well, it has become an actual product. We’ve seen videos of these before and they always have some pretty fluid and organic seeming motion. They seem almost alive in this configuration. The only thing that might make them scarier would be to add Lou Vega’s decapitated head, well maybe that plus some really nice face tracking. In the video above, you can see where someone paired one up with a Wiimote for a pretty intuitive control scheme. Yeah, we realize the video is nearly a year old, how did we miss this one? You can see a video of it walking around after the break, and another controlled by a ps2 controller.

Read the rest of this entry »




Augmented FPS gaming

posted Feb 6th 2009 10:44am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, nintendo hacks, wii hacks, xbox hacks

aug

[MikeFez] sent in this info about his augmented FPS set ups. He started this project back with an original XBox in   2006. He wanted a more immersive way of interacting with his games. Pointing out that gaming visuals and interactivity have come leaps and bounds while the controllers themselves have basically just added a few buttons, he explains his goals. He wanted to have to move his body to move his character and possibly physically aim. The original project, for the XBox, was successful in that he used a floor pad to control his character. Since then, the Wii has come out and he has moved to the PC as his main platform. As expected, he is now using the Wiimote as the aiming device.

Pseudo 3D chat

posted Jan 29th 2009 7:30pm by Eliot Phillips
filed under: downloads hacks, home entertainment hacks, misc hacks

3d_video-conference

[Chris Harrison] and [Scott E. Hudson] have built a novel system for faking a 3D video chat session. Their implementation separates the image of the chat participant from the background. They then dynamically reposition the video based on the movement of the viewers head. Their using the OpenCV library to do facial recognition (just like the Laughing Man demo). The 3D effect is very similar to what you see in [Johnny Lee]’s Wiimote headtracking. A video of the pseudo 3D chat is embedded below.

Read the rest of this entry »

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