A friend and I wanted to use a Wiimote as a PC remote for movie night. We have tried various existing software, but all had some issues: some were old Xorg-only programs, some didn’t have proper IR tracking, and all were abandoned by the developer. But most of all, no software (even modern remappers like InputPlumber) had any support for key combos. So, we set out to write our own.
Some of our requirements were:
- Key combos (the wiimote has only few buttons)
- Proper IR tracking
- The ability to enable or disable the IR with a key combo
- Having no observable latency
We first developed “esperto” a powerful system for describing and detecting key combos, which we implemented in this library. It is generic so it can be used on pretty much anything that needs combo detection. At first, we intended to plug that into InputPlumber, but then decided it would be easier to do everything ourselves.
So, we ported this IR tracking algorithm from Hector Martin to rust, and put it together with our esperto library, and this is the result. It is extremely fast (mostly dominated by the actual latency of evdev’s and uinput’s UAPI), and it meets all of our requirements. And we already have ideas for future improvements, for example how to add support for wiimote extensions.
Interesting! How do you get the Wii bar to connect to a pc?
You can buy an usb-powered one for a couple euros from AliExpress, or you can hook 5V to an original bar. But the bar itself is just two Infrared lights, there’s plenty of substitutes (i.e. literally two candles 20cm apart).
P.s. do not leave the bar permanently on, you will burn out the LEDs. The Wii turns it off with the console
P.p.s. you can configure esperto-wiimote to run a command when you connect the First wiimote, and disconnect the last. It’s meant for turning on and off the bar, if you can do it programmatically
When my IR bar broke I just used two candles as a replacement.
This is so cool
Thanks!
In the future you might consider picking up a dolphin bar. It handles all the Bluetooth stuff and has four modes, one of which is a mouse mode with motion controls and one of which is using the nunchuck. Still, very cool!
From what I see, the dolphin bar requires walking up to it to change mode. We want to enable and disable the IR by holding a button, and other combos in general. Also, I don’t know if the dolphin bar still lacks pointer smoothing, but we have it, and it’s even configurable
Pretty handy, thanks :)
