Doing Wiird Things

I don’t think anyone circa 2006 could have imagined how popular the Wii would be among hobbyists; I mean, what does the Wii provide? Buttons, accelerometer, infrared sensor, a speaker? And that’s ignoring things like the Nunchuck or the Balance Board. I have a Wii and a lot of hardware lying around for it that I haven’t touched in years; now’s as good a time as any to dust it off.

First things I tried were Processing and Unity. Surprisingly, there’s no good out-of-the-box Wii Remote library for Processing. You’d think that a Java-flavored prototyping environment and Wii Remotes would be a match made in heaven, but I guess not. There’s this Wrj4P5 thing, but its documentation is sparse, disjointed, and hard to understand.

I couldn’t be bothered to fix it, so I tried Unity-Wiimote. Apparently it works fine on Windows and macOS, but it’s not tested on Linux. I wanted to experiment with Wii controllers, not with making hidapi talk to Unity, so I moved on.

Then I came upon WiiC; it’s actually pretty good! It’s a C++ wrapper around (a modified version of) wiiuse, which seems to be dead in its tracks. I didn’t have to resort to any tricks; I literally just compiled WiiC, installed it, and successfully connected my Wii Remote to its example programs.

This all leads up to a team project for a human computer interaction class I’m taking. C++ in itself is not great for prototyping, but Qt and QML are. So my next step was to start wrapping WiiC and its classes in QObjects. You can see what my team and I are doing with that here – I call it Wiirdo (“weirdo”). It’s very early, but it works and supports QML.

Here, check it out:

…Oh, right, I have to filter it now. Come to think of it, Nintendo probably provided some API for that.