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May 10, 2008
Saga of the Wiimote Whiteboard
Been having a good time this week really being a geek again!
My project has been to make my own Wii Whiteboard as developed originally by Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon and featured at the 2008 TED conference. This let's you use your $40 Wiimote, a homemade <$10 IR Lightpen, and any surface in place of a commercial $1000+ whiteboard system. You bring the computer and the projector and here's the rest of the story.
The basic idea here is to use the Wiimote's infrared camera to point at an infrared light source and relay that information back to the computer via Bluetooth. As with so many other projects, the Wiimote projects have had most of their development on the Windows side and there are many variants of the software around the web. Although there are fewer choices, the ones I found did the job just fine.
So, what's needed.
First, you need to connect your Wiimote to your computer via Bluetooth. On the Mac, that deed is done quite simply through the System Preferences. Fire up the Blootooth control panel and add the Wiimote by pressing both the 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously when it's time to have the device discovered.
Second, let's just try to use the Wiimote as a remote mouse. For this task, the best software I found was Darwiin Remote. Again, a few little tricks. Although the directions tell you to press the software's "Find Remote" button and then the Wiimote's 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously, I found it worked more reliably if you do it the other way around. So, press 1 and 2 and your 4 LEDs will be flashing. Press the "Find Remote" button and you get confirmation that the Wiimote is all hooked up.
One more thing to take care of here. You'll need to open the Darwiin Remote buttons and define the left click and right click. I used the A and B buttons since that felt most natural.
You could stop right here and have a remote mouse and amaze your friends! But let's get to the really interesting stuff!
Third, you'll need an Infrared Lightpen to turn the whole setup into an interactive whiteboard. The complete directions can be found on Johnny Lee's site but there are variations all over the place. The best directions I found were on Youtube. This will give you a good grounding in the electronics, even if you are as much of a novice as me! This other Youtube video gives a simpler version, but you need to find the right pen. I found it useful for the closeup of the diode.
Coolcatteacher, Vicki Davis, blogged about this and found a nice Flickr image. Here's my first attempt. (I know...but it works!)
Fourth, you need the software to turn that funky IR pen into a true Interactive Whiteboard tool. That's the Wiimote Whiteboard software. In this case, the Mac version. The simplest way to get this running is to press the 1 and 2 buttons on your Wiimote and then launch the software. You'll now be able to calibrate the pen and from there it can be used as a your Whiteboard mouse complete with left and right mouse buttons.
The biggest hurdles from here are tuning your setup of the projector, screen and Wiimote considering all our options.
For an educator's journey through all of this, you can read this post from Tom Sextro, the Technology Director for Holton USD 336, who is using these in the classroom. He does a great job of chronicling their journey.
Okay, it's not exactly simple, but it's $50 and a few hours or $1500. And, it's fun!
Posted by Pat on May 10, 2008 8:10 PM
Comments
Pat, this is awesome! I think we should put the Delcastle Electronics Dept. to work next year. Hope your well.
Brian
Posted by: Brian Gross on June 26, 2008 11:49 PM
Your design is very creative. In fact, Wii has already produced many innovative controllers such as Wii Board and Wii Wheel. It could be interesting if we can have another Wii WhiteBoard
Posted by: Gamer12 on July 1, 2008 7:16 PM
