Wiimote Controlled Coil Gun

January 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 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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ArtFall: Pachinko For Techies

January 8, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

[vimeo= 2758525]

ArtFall allows you to draw on a whiteboard, then have small geometric shapes interact with your drawing like a barrier. Imagine a pachinko machine where you have to draw the pegs in. Not only can you draw barriers, but you can change the direction of gravity with either an iPhone or a Wiimote. The footage also shows some sound interaction as the pieces seem to bounce with the bass from some music. The effect is quite nice and somewhat reminiscent of the whiteboard pong we saw recently.

[thanks eric]

25C3: CTF Dominated By Iphone-dev Team, HackMii

December 30, 2008 by Eliot 4 Comments

25c3ctf

While we had been excited about 25C3’s CTF competition, we couldn’t even venture a guess as to who would win. It seems the iphone-dev team weren’t satisfied to just give an amazing talk. They teamed up with the Wii hackers from HackMii to win the competition. You can see their progress during the eight hour competition above in red. It’s impressive to see hardware hackers jumping over to network security AND completely killing at it.

WeeP5 A Wii Zapper On Steroids

December 26, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

wii_zapper

This is the WeeP5, a fully functional Wii controller gun that looks like an MP5. [TheOreos] found the original zapper attachments to be lacking in several areas. His solution was to build a controller, integrated into an existing gun design with all the buttons exactly where he wanted them. He picked up a toy MP5 and sacrificed a Wiimote for the cause. He did a fantastic job, it looks great and, according to him, works well too. He may want to consider putting an orange tip on it though, just to keep from spooking the police.

Guitar Hero Cymbal Remake

December 23, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

drums

[Matt] found, like many people, his Guitar Hero: World Tour cymbals left much to be desired. They were only detecting hits intermittently and starting to crack and fall apart as well. While he was waiting for his warranty replacements to arrive, he just couldn’t help by try to make his own improved version. Using about $25 worth of parts, mainly consisting of plastic plates and some neoprene material, he managed to make some pretty fantastic replacements. A video of them working might be a nice addition, but the writeup was pretty detailed otherwise.

Wiimote Driven Motion Effects

December 22, 2008 by Eliot 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]

The Hemp-Mote

December 11, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

hemp-mote-01

We’re sure that almost every one of our readers has been wondering why they can’t have a hemp covered Wiimote. Well, [Dhreck] got tired of waiting and made one himself. This isn’t just as simple as covering a Wiimote with hemp chord. Major modifications had to be made to keep it from getting too bulky. [Dhreck] whittled down most of the shell, then re formed it with modeling putty. After sanding that nice and smooth and applying a nice black paint job, he started the painstaking process of wrapping it in hemp. It still works perfectly fine, but can fray if you are too hard on it. So, if you get your hands on some hemp, take it easy on your Wii.