Sunday, January 27, 2013

Wiimote controller extension

I would like to use a nice controller on my Wii for those more complex games, but a Classic Controller is still  expensive.

As there are some old controllers around the house why not trying to use them through an Arduino?

Wiimote has a proprietary connector, so it's better to use the cable from a broken or fake controller extension (like nunchuck). I bought one from ebay for about $3. It's wires are very thin and hard to solder, but I'm hoping they will suffice.


I opened the connector to try to replace the wires for thicker ones, but they are well stuck inside the connector, so I decided not to risk breaking it.




There is a lot of documentation on how to hack most of the capabilities of this controller (and they are a lot!), but even then it can be frustrating to a newbie like me to get it working.

I found a cool sample on  http://gitorious.org/randomstuff/arduino-wiimote but it was outdated I wouldn't compile on Arduino 1.0 IDE.
So I did some modifications that I keep in my own repo (all my documentation is on the code).

As a test I used the Genesis controller I wrote about in the previous post.
The code for using both in the same Arduino is in this branch.

All I've done for now was a very crude attempt to prove functionality.


Next I'm thinking of a more permanent solution with power saving in mind. Also I would like to use other kinds of controller.

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