Wiimote drivers for OS X

[jasenj1]

Since the Wii's Wiimote is just a Bluetooth device, work has begun on developing drivers for it for the Mac, Windows, and Linux. Head over to Wiili (http://www.wiili.org) to join the fun.

Useful resources to get started include:

An OS X Enabler (http://www.wiili.org/forum/osx-wiimote-enabler-t229.html) which lets the Wiimote pair with a Mac. It's a bit buggy, but provides a first try.
Their Wiimote driver (http://www.wiili.org/Wiimote_driver) wiki page.
Their Wiimote (http://www.wiili.org/Wiimote) wiki page - which contains the Bluetooth command mappings found so far.

[Skorche]

Sweet. I was wondering how long it would take before people took a hack at this.

[Nick]

That's cool. And since the "sensor bar" actually just sends IR beams to the Wiimote which does the triangulation and sends that data to the system, someone will just have to hack up a way to connect the sensor bar to some power source.

[Zwilnik]

That's cool. And since the "sensor bar" actually just sends IR beams to the Wiimote which does the triangulation and sends that data to the system, someone will just have to hack up a way to connect the sensor bar to some power source.

Already been done. Essentially it appears to just be a case of hacking off the connector and wiring it to a 9V battery (or just using candles instead)

[Nick]

Already been done. Essentially it appears to just be a case of hacking off the connector and wiring it to a 9V battery (or just using candles instead)

Nice. I didn't think it'd be so simple. I hope the WiiLi project figures out how to run the Linux without modding a Wii. I'd probably try it out at least.

Btw, has anyone tried the Opera browser for the Wii? Is it even available yet? (I don't have a Wii so I don't know). Just wondering if it worked alright.

[funkboy]

Opera browser is not available yet; it will be released sometime in 2007.

[maximile]

That's so cool... so cool. I hadn't even considered that this would be possible, but of course it makes sense.

Btw, has anyone tried the Opera browser for the Wii? Is it even available yet? (I don't have a Wii so I don't know). Just wondering if it worked alright.

I think that the Wii shop uses Opera, and by directing it through a proxy on your computer you can visit any other website. It's very hacky though. There are some videos on youtube about it.

[jasenj1]

My officemate and I messed around with this at work today. We got as far as pairing with the Wiimote and being able to get button presses. Whenever the button states change, the Wiimote sends a Bluetooth message.

It took far longer than it should have as neither of us know Objective C or anything about Bluetooth. But we are programmers with rusty C skills and were able to muddle through it.

XCode has some example BT programs that we used as the starting point (as does the example code pointed to above).

- Jasen.

[MarkJ]

Check out: http://blog.hiroaki.jp/2006/12/000433.html

While not a full-on HID solution, this'll let you use the wiimote as a mouse and responds to button presses with hard-coded keyboard events. It has an endian bug so the key mappings are off on the PPC-side.

Since the source was provided, and what I really want is to be able to use my wii controller as a wireless gamepad for games and emulators, I fixed the PPC endian-ness issue, and set the mapping to Cave Story (http://astrange.ithinksw.net/tools/Doukutsu.zip) controls.

Grab my version here: http://www.sloppydisk.com/mark/misc/Darwiinmote-CaveStoryMapping.zip

Hold the controller like an NES controller.
1 = X
2 = Z
A = S
+ = q
Up, down, left, right = Up down left right

[Skorche]

Hey that's really cool, it doesn't actually have tilt sensors. It's sensitive enough to read gravity and deduce the tilt from the accelerometers.

[FreakSoftware]

Today, a classmate in one of my classes was giving a presentation on his Windows machine using a Wiimote as the presentation controller. The cool thing was not just that he was using a Wiimote and could use buttons to go to the next slide etc, presumably by built in tilt sensors communicating over IR he was using it as a mouse. It was pretty cool, though not veeery effective (it was alittle slow and needed to be perfectly flat to not move).