Wiimoteless IR Whiteboard


[Eduard] sent in his IR webcam whiteboard project. He wanted something like the Wiimote version, but without the expense of a Wiimote. He added some film negative to the camera to reduce the amount of visible light picked up by the CCD. (He notes that you might need to pull the IR filter from your camera to get a decent signal.) The pen is the usual IR LED with a power supply. To do the actual work, he wrote a custom application in Java.

9 thoughts on “Wiimoteless IR Whiteboard

  1. That’s awful complicated for something that can be done for $40 and a few minutes downloading and installing. What I hope to see(or submit if I get it working) is a whiteboard with different colored ‘markers’ controlled by the modulation of the IR LED. Some sort of pattern or frequency that would tell the computer to draw a red line instead of blue or black.
    -Mac

  2. You can get a used Wiimote for like 25 bucks if you look around, while the webcam was probably at least 10, not counting the film and the time/effort to hack out the IR filter. The dude went to all this trouble to save ~15 bucks? Geh.

  3. But isn’t the point of using the Wiimote to get a high quality system for a low price? I mean, webcams run at a resolution of something like 320×240, (some go to 640×480 but at severely reduced framerates) and the Wiimote, for only about $30 more is wireless, only picks up IR light and is not affected by anything else, runs at 1024×768 and a much higher framerate than the webcam.

  4. More people may own webcams, but many webcams come with IR filters… so how many people are willing to hack open their webcam vs. buy a wiimote? Sure, most of us hackers wouldn’t think twice about cracking open that webcam… but for the average joe? The wiimote still wins. (at least it should, anyway)

Leave a Reply to TechBenderCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.