Wiimote WhiteBoard

Fairly Trouble Free Setup

Since early this year the web has been buzzing about how the Nintendo Wii remote can be used to create a very inexpensive yet very effective interactive whiteboard. Johnny Chung Lee from Carnegie Mellon University has developed an application that combines the Wiimote, a bluetooth capable computer, data projector and an Infrared LED pen to create the interactive whiteboard.

There are numerous sites dedicated to providing advice and ideas on creating and using the Wiimote  whiteboard. Johnny’s site and the Wiimote Project site are good places to start your exploration.

The prototype we created worked so well we are in the process of building six Wiimote whiteboard kits. Shared below is the process and configurations that we have found to be very reliable on our Lenovo / IBM machines running Windows XP/Vista and using the standard Windows bluetooth drivers.

Creating the IR Pen

The schematic below from Johnny’s site shows the simplicity of the pen.

IR Pen Schematic

Our pens were created using a whiteboard marker, a momentary switch, a 5mm IR LED and a AAA battery holder (all electricals from Jaycar). Just remember the longer leg of the LED connects to the positive terminal of the battery. The pen can be tested using any digital camera, eg. the camera in your mobile phone is sensitive to IR light.

The Software

Johnny Lee created the original software for the wiimote whiteboard. His efforts have been further refined by Boon Jin. Visit BoonJin.com to obtain Wiimote Smoothboard 0.4.6 BETA. This is an excellent application with nice features like floating toolbars and offscreen toggles for onscreen keyboards and the like. Note it does require Net Framework 3.5.

Partnered with this I would highly recommend you obtain a copy of an autoconnect utility for dealing with setting up the bluetooth connection between the wiimote and the PC. You can do it manually without any real drama – see link, but an autoconnect utility saves you the tedium and is quicker.

The Connection Procedure

1. You have installed the Smoothboard application and the Autoconnect utility on your PC (actually they will run from a USB flash drive). You have plugged in a Bluetooth adapter (dongle) and allowed time for it to install itself using generic Windows drivers.

2. On the Wiimote simply press the “1″ and “2″ buttons simultaneously to put it into “discoverable” mode – four blue lights will begin flashing on the Wiimote.

3. Quickly fire up the autoconnect utility. The utility informs you when the Wiimote is connected (approx. 20 seconds).

4. At this point the four lights on the remote should still be flashing, if not just push “1″ and “2″ again. Now launch the smoothboard application. once the application detects the wiimote (again about 20 seconds) only one light will be lit on the Wiimote. The smoothboard application will display the battery strength of the Wiimote and you are now ready to calibrate the whiteboard surface.

5. Position the wiimote about 2-3 m from the whiteboard surface at an angle of around forty five degrees to the board. Aim the front window of the remote at the centre of the whiteboard. Click button “A” on the wiimote or click the “Quick Calibration” button on the smoothboard app. When prompted click the four corners of the whiteboard , just as Johnny does in the video, and you are away! As a rule of thumb we have found a “tracking utilization” of around 40% gives good results (see bottom left corner of smoothboard app for the tracking utilization). A smaller percentage utilization results in lower resolution and jerky movements.

Hope this helps….enjoy!