I have had a lot more time on my hands so I decided to try a little project I saw online a couple of years ago. I don’t remember how I actually came across these videos but I recommend that you should watch it if you are interested in the future of technology. These videos blew me away when I first viewed them. This guy Johnny Chung Lee was working on a project for school, and he showed that using your wiimote that has and infrared camera to track infrared lights you can accomplish some amazing things . Just take a quick look at these two videos. The first video is 3D stuff wich will blow you away about mid way through so please just listen carefully and watch(especially seeing how important 3D is right now with new TVs coming and the blockbuster hit Avatar). The second videos is the project I tried out, creating a cheap and powerful Whiteboard.
OK back on track. The second video of the Smartboard using a wiimote is very intriguing because of how cheap it is to make such and expensive product typically. Since this video was posted, he has inspired many other projects like it. There is now a community of people developing more tools to use this simple technology to our advantage. These tool are free as well. Just head over to wiimoteprojects and read up on the projects, and there is plenty of help if you run into any problems.
Now here are some of my experience attempting it. First I built my own Infrared or IR pen. There are a few sites with Schematics to build your pen including Instructables. I used information from all of them to build one that I thought would work best for me. This is the pen I built.
The giant Sharpie highlighter works great for this. It fits all the parts perfectly and even gives you the ability to make the battery easily replaceable. I used a N size battery but a AAA battery would fit as well, and would power the pen perfectly. Using just a soldering iron (solder of course), some pliers and some hot glue it all came together fairly easily. Just lay everything out before hand and make sure your wiring is correct. The other thing is that you will not be able to see the IR LED. The light is out of the range of the visible light for the human eye. So when testing your wiring you should use a digital camera. The digital camera can see IR light . The other issue I found was the actual use of the pen on the white board. The IR light was very forward directional , so when using it like a pen on a board the IR camera on the wiimote would not see it very well. I read online that using sandpaper to scuff the LED so the light diffuses better will solve my issue. Other than that is is very accurate and fun to use (just a slight learning curve to get use to it).
The next step after making the pen is pairing your wiimote to your computer. This is where i have had may issues so I will try to give some explanation to what you should look out for. For your PC: Depending on your bluetooth driver you may find extreme difficulty on pairing your wiimote. The key is having a windows native driver that allows you to pair WITHOUT a passkey. If you are not able to do this then you will need another bluetooth dongle or a 3rd party bluetooth software like BlueSoleil. Although I have read this is a good option, the software is not free (it has a free version but is limited to 2mb data). For you Mac: I have not have any issue in pairing my wiimote through bluetooth (on a side not check out Darwiin, will map your wiimote buttons to work with emulatores for NES or SNES or many other games). The interesting things to help my previous issue with see the IR light you can pair two wiimotes that will talk to each other through the software so it doesn’t matter at what angle you are standing or holding the pen. If keep a clean line of sight either way.
Software is the next step. If you are on a PC and have successfully paired your Wiimote, wiimoteprojects (linked above) has a nifty little program called Smoothboard that gives many tool desired for a whiteboard. Like changing pen colors, highlighter, and plain whiteboard to draw on. For Mac i found a simple cross platform (runs on Java so will work on Linux and PC) program called Wiimote Whiteboard that gives you the ability to use your IR pen as a mouse but does not give you the presentation style floating tool box that Smoothboard gives you. Both are very cool and easy to use.
I will continue to test them out and give back my input. If you are brave enough you should definitely try it out. For only $40 you can gave yourself a very powerful Whiteboard in you office or home that would normally cost you over $1000. If you are willing to give it try let me know and I will see what I can do to help you along. Impress you office and your boss with this, or have some fun with your friends drawing on a giant screen or flying through google earth.( Oh yea…it has multitouch, so multiple pens if you make them, and all that zooming fun like the iphone with the pinch.) Good Luck!
