wiimote 01

Finally some success. Ever since a friend showed me Johnny Chung Lee's wiimote projects, I've been wanting to try 'em out for myself. It's taken me a few weeks but I finally had something working this weekend.

The coolest wiimote app that I've tried so far is bluetunes. My laptop can be across the room and I can sit on the couch and wave the wiimote around to change tracks, up/down the volume, and play/pause. Yeah, nothing amazing but I'm lazy when it comes to music and remotes.

Now I'm messing with Johnny Lee's whiteboard app but I lack a good IR source. I'm using my tv remote and it kinda works but not very reliable. Tomorrow, I'm going to break open an old remote to make an IR pen.

I think I told you the story about my lost bluetooth adapter. A while back I bought an adapter to use with my gumstix. I've looked everywhere for that thing but it's now been declared MIA. So this past week, I bought another adapter thru a deal for $8.99 that I found at bargainjack.com. Remember kids - you get what you pay for. See that really cool antenna? Fake. It's just a plastic stick. See the thumb drive sized case? Empty. The whole actual bluetooth card is about the size of the USB plug. It's like a bag of potato chips. All air and a tiny board. No idea why they did that. The adapter works pretty well and pairs with my cell phone on the other side of the house so it has range. Just weird crap.

The new adapter came with BlueSoleil drivers which seem to work ok with my cell phone and my GPS but just wouldn't work with the wiimote. It would discover the device as "Nintendo RVL-CNT-01" but then wouldn't start the Human Interface Device (HID) service. During the 23 odd times of installing/uninstalling/reinstalling, I saw that I also had a Toshiba bluetooth stack installed but I couldn't get it working with the wiimote either so it was dumped.

I then tried the widcomm drivers but they didn't work at all with my adapter. No fault of the drivers, they've worked for me before. I was losing patience and probably didn't spend enough time with them.

I've finally reinstalled the Toshiba bluetooth and it works great. Unfortunately, it says it's a 30 day trial but has no option to buy.

The final secret for it to work for me seems to be pressing and holding down the the wiimote keys during both the discovery and pairing process. When the software asks you to type in a pairing key, type nothing and just hit return.