Wiimote Controlled Coil Gun

January 14, 2009 by 24 Comments

iocoil1

[thecapacity] sent us his iobridge project where he controls a coil gun with a Wiimote. To make the coil gun, he took apart an office golf putter that had a ball return.  The mechanism to return the ball is a metal cylinder that is moved magnetically. He simply replaced the cylinder with a smaller diameter piece of metal to create the gun.   His computer monitors the Wiimote axis changes and sends them to the ioBridge. The unit could be located anywhere, but without a camera on it, he’ll have a hard time aiming. There’s a video of it working after the break.

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Wiimote Driven Motion Effects

December 22, 2008 by 5 Comments

[vimeo 2515709]

Check out the video above by [Adrien Mondot] for a extensive demonstration of eMotion being used with a Wiimote. eMotion is a physics based visual tool for the Mac. It’s designed to enhance performances by reacting to real world motion. Its grounding in physics makes the resultant motion appear more natural than if they were arbitrarily generated. The video above combines eMotion with the output of Wiimote Whiteboard, a low-cost interactive white board that uses the Wiimote camera plus IR light pens. While the video takes place in a small area, we can see how this could be scaled to a much larger space with IR lights mounted to performers.

[via CDM]

Wiimoteless IR Whiteboard

July 28, 2008 by 9 Comments


[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.

More Wiimote Hacking From Johnny Lee

June 23, 2008 by 2 Comments

Our friend [Johnny Lee] has been quite busy traveling and moving to a new city. He hasn’t had time to put together any new videos because of this. He’s been doing more Wiimote research though and has put together an extensive post about what he’s working on and thinking about.

Right before the move, he put together a demo for throwable displays. The square pieces of foamcore have retro-reflective tape added to each of the corners. The Wiimote sees the orientation of the square and adjusts the projected image to fit perfectly; even when you pick it up and throw it. He used it to add a trail to an airhockey puck. Embedded above is an earlier project where he used the Wiimote to track a foldable display and project accordingly.

[Johnny] has also been working on 3D tracking with two or more Wiimotes. Since the Wiimote is camera based, stereo triangulation is simple. Check out the video below from the University of Cambridge that uses two Wiimotes for motion capture.

Have a look at [Johnny Lee]’s full post for even more Wiimote ideas.

Hackaday Podcast 245: The Silver Swan, ET’s Umbrella Antenna, Model Tanks Vs Space Shuttle Tires

November 24, 2023 by No comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi link up through the magic of the Internet to go over some of their favorite stories from the last week. After revealing the bone-chilling winners of this year’s Halloween contest, the discussion switches over to old-timey automatons, receiving deep space transmissions with a homebrew antenna that would make E.T. proud, and the treasures that can be found while poking around in a modern car’s CAN bus.

They’ll also go over how NASA saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by hacking a remote controlled WWII tank, CNC controlled microscopes, and a cinema-quality camera you can probably build from what you’ve already got in the parts bin. Finally, they’ll detail an ambitious effort to recreate an old computer’s motherboard with a new feature in KiCad, and muse over all the interesting things that become possible once your test equipment can talk to your computer.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download and enjoy listening with a cold turkey sandwich.

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Light Guns Aren’t Just For CRTs Anymore

October 23, 2023 by 17 Comments

For how much of a cultural phenomenon light gun games like Duck Hunt were, they didn’t survive the transition from CRT televisions to LCDs particularly well because of all of the technological quirks the light guns exploited in older technology that simply disappeared with modern TVs. But it’s not impossible to get a similar gameplay from modern technology as evidenced by the success of the Wii and its revolutionary Wiimote, and there are plenty of modern games that use similar devices. There are a few paths to getting older light guns working again, though.

The first system to note, called SAMCO, uses a system of LEDs and a camera to synchronize the game’s flashes to the new technology and translate the input back into the game. Gun4ir uses a similar technique, and boasts extremely high accuracy and low latency largely due to being programmed in assembly. Both systems can use either an infrared tracking sensor or a Wiimote sensor as the LEDs and while the SAMCO system can run on a Raspberry Pi Pico, Gun4ir exclusively uses ATmega32U4 boards with the optimized assembly programming.

Both SAMCO and Gun4ir offer PCBs for anyone looking to try them out without designing their own circuit boards, and once the electronics are assembled they can either be put in an original NES-era light gun, put in a custom printed enclosure, or even stuffed into a Nerf gun. For others looking for a more turnkey solution, there are also offerings from companies like Sinden which make complete system. You can always build your own system to restore the functionality of original light guns from scratch if that’s more your style.

Thanks to [LookAtDaShinyShiny] for tipping us off to the latest happenings in the light gun community!

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons