Using Accelerometer in Wiimote for Physics Practicals

Question

I have to develop some software in my school to utilize the accelerometer in the Wiimote for recording data from experiments, for example finding the acceleration and velocity of a moving object. I understand how the accelerometer values will be used but I am sort of stuck on the programming front. There is a set of things that I would like to do:

1. Live streaming of data from the Wiimote via bluetooth
2. Use the accelerometer values to find velocity and displacment via integration
3. Plot a set of results
4. Avoid the use of the infrared sensor on the Wiimote

Please can anyone give me their thoughts on how to go about this. Also it would be great if people could direct me to existing projects that utizlise the wiimote. Also can someone suggest what would be the best programming language to use for this. My current bet is on using Visual basic.

Any sort of help is greatly appretiated.

Answer 1

There's some famous projects using the Wii remote by Johnny Lee Chung.

They use C# and you can download the source.

By and large they are the reverse of what you want - they use the camera, but you should be able to use the source as a starting point and to analyse the data coming from the remote.

NOTE: At the time of writing the Wiimote library linked to is unavailable, but as it's an MSDN site it should be back soon.

Addendum: It looks like this is now available on Codeplex

This also has a link to various applications built on the library. Wii Drum High looks like it just reads the accelerometer.

Answer 2

I have written some software to do some of what you ask. Check out wiiphysics.site88.net.

You will find integrating the acceleration data very tricky to get any decent results.

It is written in c#.

Answer 3

One problem is what are your initial conditions (ok if you start at rest), the other is that by the time you get to displacement you will have a lot of noise (the acceleration data from a wiimote is only 8-bit)