Wii-Purposing the WiiMote- A homemade whiteboard sketchpad

By Sean Bybee 

Since becoming a part of LEAF, I’ve gotten a few requests from others in need of my “talents.” Of course, most of these requests have been random people asking me to build them top of the line gaming computers for free, so I didn’t take them very seriously. Recently, however, I was approached with an actually reasonable request! During one of LEAF’s after school meetings, Mr. Risse just happened to walk through the Ag building. He pulled me aside, and told me about an interesting project that he wanted to try out with his classes.

            We’ve all heard of the Wii, a console (paper-weight) made by Nintendo. For most people, a Wii is good for exercise “games” and Mario kart. For Johnny Lee, however, the Wii, or rather its signature remote, have a much more useful application. Johnny Lee, using a Wii Remote, a pen that emits IR light, and a few lines of code, created a program that allows any projector screen to become an interactive sketchpad. A Wii remote typically operates by picking up short range radio waves from the Wii, but it can also pick up the Infrared light put off by special LEDs such as the one in the pen. By rigging up a mount for the remote and facing it towards the screen, you can use it as an input for your computer and project it onto the screen. The program written by Mr. Lee allows this input to be translated into lines on the screen. Essentially, this is like the sketchpads already used by many teachers, but more convenient, and certainly more cool!

            After a short Beta test with Mr. Risse, I have no doubt that more teachers would become interested in this for their own classrooms. There is already widespread use of the projectors in almost all classrooms, so this could be easily incorporated into the teaching style of most of our instructors. Once it has been proven to work, this could even become a cheap alternative to whiteboards. With a Wii remote costing roughly 10 dollars, and an IR pen costing slightly more, the cost for one of these units should range anywhere from 20 to 30 dollars, substantially cheaper than the sketchpads that we currently use.