Episode: 62
Title: HPR0062: More than a wii bit of fun with the Wiimote
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0062/hpr0062.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:53:56

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Genoa, scandals are dead, sure they're possible hellbuss.
I adult is much myself, with me.
Die!
Take them out!
That looks like it's it.
Oh, and Commander?
Do bring in the comms unit.
It's time for a broadcast.
Today, on Hacker Public Radio, we'll learn how to have more than just a wee bit of fun with the Nintendo Wii most.
Hey!
I am Morgan, the low-tech mystic, and you?
Well, you, my friends, would be listening to another fine episode of Hacker Public Radio.
And today, we're going to be discussing the basics of connecting a Nintendo Wii most to a computer running Windows XP via Bluetooth.
There's a lot of neat things that you can do with this.
I've been really impressed with the level of things that you can do and the basic relatively ease.
The only URL I'm going to give out in this episode of Hacker Public Radio is going to be Wheelie.org, which is where I've basically pulled a lot of my information.
They've got a wonderful wiki running there that has a whole lot of information on how to get the stuff running.
They also are doing something rather interesting.
They are collecting donations for a, basically, I guess, a correct term would be a prof for the first person to be able to get Linux running on a Wii without voiding the warranty.
Basically, that means not cracking it open and soldering on fancy mod chips and doing that.
They're talking about getting a USB, hard drive, or external media bay, something like that, and booting off of that, or something creative like that.
But that basically you're not cracking it open and obviously voiding the warranty.
Right now, they've got $147, but I'd be interesting to see how far that goes and who gets it and nothing else.
It's kind of neat. You can get some money for a Git Linux to run on a Wii, so definitely check that out.
Right now, we're going to talk about Windows XP.
Please reserve the throwing of Rothen vegetables until the end of the episode.
Thank you.
But if you want to go to hackerpublicradio.org, you can find a list of all the links and all the source code that we're going to be discussing in this episode.
So you're not going to listen to me ramble on about URLs.
You're just going to listen to me ramble.
Excellent.
So basically, if you have a computer, you have Windows XP, you have Bluetooth capability, whether natively or with a dongle, and you have a Nintendo Weemote, you are ready to world.
The first thing you are going to need to do is you're going to need to go to hackerpublicradio.org, and you're going to need to go to this episode's show notes.
And you are going to click on the links, and you are going to first go to the Wheelie Wiki, which is going to discuss getting the Weemote to work as a mouse in Windows XP.
And basically, it's going to tell you to install a few programs.
Basically, it recommends that you install Blue Soleil, which is a Bluetooth program that works very nicely on Windows from what I've used so far of it.
I'm very glad that they recommended it.
It's very nice and easy to get all your devices to work, and it's just rather impressive as far as how it scans and does other neat things.
It kind of reminds me of Linux on the command line.
So it's all that, but it was still kind of impressive to see on Windows XP nonetheless.
And it makes everything easy to sync up your Weemote with the computer.
Once you have used Blue Soleil's free program or wallet shareware, and then you can buy it or whatnot.
But anyway, once you've used Blue Soleil's program to sync the Nintendo Weemote with your Windows XP computer, please reserve the throwing of vegetables until the end of the episode.
Once you've got that all going, you're going to need to install a program, a program called Glove Pi.
Pi stands for, I think it was program interface emulator.
Basically, it's a program that was developed for mapping out keystrokes and things like that with virtual reality gloves.
If you ever listened to any of my episodes of Ninja Night School Radio, there were a few episodes where I talked about ordering and getting a P5 data glove, which was this kind of little cheap, rinky dink virtual reality glove that I used this weird looking IR sensor stand to track the data and stuff like that.
This little glove was really cheap, so I had fun playing with it.
But this is a program that lets you write scripts and macros and a lot of neat things that you can do with the glove and stuff like that.
Also, they have tweaked it and developed it to work with the Nintendo Weemote.
And the very nice thing is that you follow the link in the show notes and you download the zip of Glove Pi 3.0.
And once you unzip that folder, it's going to have your Glove Pi EXE and it's also going to have a text file that is documentation.
And that is a wonderful file. It's got all the basic stuff you need to know for working with Glove Pi and what commands do what and basically how to get started.
I'm not a coding expert, but the documentation was enough for an experienced coder as my an in experienced coder as myself.
Sorry, excuse me. Please reserve of the vegetables until the end of the episode.
Thank you. But I basically allowed a very inexperienced coder as myself to read through the documentation and it's fairly simple.
Well, at least to me, it was how it was working and I guess because I'm working with robots right now.
And that this that we moat basically is using a Cartesian coordinate mapping system, which basically means it has an x, y, and z coordinate grid system, much like a CNC machine and other such devices.
Anyway, rambling, rambling, rambling. Please reserve the throwing of what vegetables and eggs until the end of this episode.
So the next step once you have your remote sink to via Bluetooth, blue sole, however, and Glove Pi running is that you're going to copy the script that is beneath all the instructions there, which is the bare minimum basic instructions for getting the remote to work as a mouse.
On your computer, which is really neat and the basic way this works is you're going to copy the text, the real code that is on the page there.
And then you're going to paste that into Glove Pi and you're going to click and you're going to tilt, you're going to tilt the we moat up and down to move the mouse up and down and you're going to twist it side to side.
So you're going to like turn it, you're going to roll the remote, the we moat, remote, whatever.
You're going to roll that back.
Roll that back, roll.
You're going to roll that back home because it's so we moat back.
Yeah, sometimes I just say bastard.
Okay, so, but yeah, you move the we moat up and down to move the mouse up and down and you twist it or roll the we moat side to side.
And instead of actually moving it side to get the mouse to move side to side.
And it's for the most part, it probably needs a little bit of tweaking each we moat is a little bit different as far as how it's calibrated and how it's going to work with your computer.
So you'll definitely need to go in and tweak with the code a little bit.
And this is a fun time for somebody who's maybe never missed within the code to go in and maybe have a chance to learn some code.
This is a very easy kind of system to go in and especially if you're kind of quote unquote reverse engineering.
But if you're listening to Haggar Public Radio's and you know, this is a little bit of reverse engineering.
You're going to have the code from the make the we moat work as a mouse and you can go in and what it does when you actually run it.
It shows in the debug window, which will be at the top right hand corner of glove pie.
Lovely. Please reserve the throwing of rotten fruit and vegetables plus eggs until the end of this episode.
Thank you.
But basically at the top right hand corner in the debug window of glove pie, it's going to show you the values for the XYZ of the we moat.
So you can actually watch those values change as you swing the we mode around and kind of get an idea for you know what these values should be.
And as you look to the code, if you spent just a little bit of time looking through the documentation, you can easily match up what's going on in the documentation.
So you don't really need to be a code ninja or code master.
You just be able to kind of be a matching ninja.
Find what's going on in the mouse code there and basically match it up with the documentation in the glove pie folder.
And basically, boom, you can, if you can match, then you can figure out what's going on there. And it's fairly simple.
So if you want to calibrate your we mode, if it's a little bit off, for example, when I first ran my we mode as a mouse program, my we mode wanted to go to the top and to the left just a little bit, but it always just slammed up to the top of the window.
So basically I had to calibrate and what I did to calibrate is I laid it flat on its belly with the the A button facing up straight in the air.
I guess that's obvious if you have a we mode.
But anyway, what you're, but what you're going to do is you're going to see once you run the program with the we mode laying on this belly, you're going to see the debug values for the XYZ coordinates.
And you can use that going into the code to set that as your basically a reference point in robotics, we would call it your home point.
So, but basically this is your starting point from where the we mode is going to be.
So if you were say naturally going to be holding the we mode at a say 90 degree angle, then you would want to say how you're holding the we mode naturally as your home point or as your starting point for where you're using as the calibration.
But if you want to lay it flat on its belly or however you're going to be holding that's how you want to calibrate this little monkey and then what you've got that going it's it's kind of neat.
You can play around with the values the the twist or will the role and the different values and see how that changes the speed and right there.
Hey, you just got a little coding experience and if you're coding mentioned, then it will be really easy to jump in this and tweak around and have a little bit fun with.
And speaking of having a little bit of fun, the neatest thing that I found so I actually got this working actually got this working today at school.
I have a two hour break in between classes at college and so I spent that time today working on the we mode and there is a script.
There'll be a link to the show notes. It is the the we saver.
And basically what this does is it maps out the keys on the we mode to play a sound effects through the computer speakers of a lightsaber and it reacts to you swing it around and it's really neat.
And if you listen to the beginning of this episode and basically what you heard there was me tweaking out having fun with my we mode basically what I did is I brought the laptop out into the car and I hooked the headphone jack up to the stereo and I turned down the internal mic on the laptop down really low.
And it turned stereo up really loud and I swung the we mode around the we saberscript running and screened and had a good time and made a neat little intro and basically that's how that worked.
But basically if you follow the link in the show notes, all you need to do is copy and paste to that code and boom.
You are actually I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to go ahead and just say the top PI or whatever the the glove program is or the glove pie program.
And you can just download that file and check that out and you'll really like it. It also comes with a sound package that is actually you know how you're generating sound effects from the lightsaber and all that.
So you'll need to install that into the basically it'll be a zip file and you'll need to unzip that and put it in the we mode scripts directory and make sure that in your code it matches up with where you have the folder directed.
And as long as you have the we sabers script saved in the we mode folder and then you have the lightsaber sound effects saved in the we mode scripts holder, you should be OK.
And basically once you have that unzipped and you run the program, you press for the trigger button and that's going to turn on your lightsaber and you can swing it around and you'll have cool swooshing motions.
And you can hold down the trigger and it makes the sound effect of lightsabers clashing upon lightsabers or another effect. And then if you hold down the down button on the D pad while you swing it around, it makes the sound effect of at least in my mind reflecting lasers from the lightsaber like they would do.
So it's basically a lot of fun. The A button is what quits the program or it doesn't quit the program, but it closes or quote unquote closes the lightsaber.
However, you want to say that, but the sound effects and everything is just really fun. And like I said, I was missing with this today call it in my break in between classes and I was sitting in the break room and I got it working while I was sitting in the break room and I started swinging it around before I looked up from being hunched over my laptop.
And after I had swung it around and made lots of noise as a lightsaber and the weamote I looked up and the break room was apparently full because it was break in between the classes and so everybody was staring at me because I'm making lightsaber noises and waving around the weamote.
For the most part, everybody was pretty cool. Nobody like through rotten fruit vegetables or rotten eggs in my general direction. So a general victory is considered in such situations.
But yeah, it was pretty cool. I had a couple guys from the electronics and the graphics program that came over and like, you know, we're like, hey, dude, what the hell are you going on?
And so, you know, I showed them my setup and let them play around with the weamote and swing it around and, you know, the weasever and all that good fun. So it was really cool.
And I'll have to say this is just a really fun, anything to get set up and it's not really super awesome as far as and it's going to change your life.
But it's something that's really easy to do and it's really fun that just makes you smile and it's something that doesn't take very long to set up.
That you can, you know, take your laptop over to your buddies with your weamote and be like, hey, dude, check this out.
You know, and it's guaranteed smiles and it's just really neat and it's also a perfect example of in my mind what hacking really is.
Hacking isn't about stealing credit cards or hurting individuals or taking advantage of people.
It's about doing creative things. It's almost like an artist but with technology. So it's got a different twist. And in a way, it's much like what we're doing with the weamote in this episode.
And we're taking a device that's made to be a video game controller and we're making it into a computer mouse and into a lightsaber and basically doing things that it's not designed to do.
And that's really neat. And in my mind, that's a whole lot that just emphasizes and has the hacker spirit.
So that's why I decided to share this with you today. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode of hacker public radio.
I hope if you guys have a weamote, you check this out. And if you don't think about it, you know, a Bluetooth thongle, you know, maybe 40 bucks.
Weamote, I got my news. I think I paid 30 bucks for it and it came with a nice little rubber grip. So when I smack people with it, it doesn't damage my weamote.
So that way I can still bust people around with it. And it doesn't hurt my weamote because I don't want to smack somebody outside the head and then have to go by a new weamote, you know, you need usability.
I need to be able to smack multiple people. And in case the zombie invasion ever happens, it'd be really cool to run around my laptop for however long the battery lives and smack zombies on the head lightsaber style.
But anyway, I think it's about time. So those of you in the listening lines that may have collected rotten fruit vegetables and or eggs, you may feel free to already your ammunition.
Once again, thanks for listening. You guys out there, think about it. It's maybe say max 70 80 dollar investment. If you don't have if you don't have a Bluetooth or a weamote, assuming you have a computer when those XP, it's really easy to set up and going.
And it's just really fun to show off and it's it's really fun to see the reaction from people when you know you set down with your computer and whip out the weamote and then all of a sudden it's making lightsaber sound effects and you're zip it around.
And it's really neat and it's really fun. So nevertheless, I'm going to end this up. Thanks for listening and you guys have a great day and tune in tomorrow for another excellent episode.
Of Hacker Public Radio.
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