Controlling movement with a Wii Balance Board

"rmcclelland" wrote:
I was also thinking about this. Looks great! How hard is it to work with the Wii Balance board in Windows?

Maybe someone needs to Kickstart a PC version.

It's not incredibly hard, though there's definitely room for improvement with driver support.

Any PC with bluetooth can pair with Wii remotes. (as far as the hardware goes, a balance board behaves as though it were a wii remote with a permanent attachment), although various bluetooth drivers can be a little buggy at times.

The existing drivers are reasonable to work with if you're creating entirely custom code, and link directly to the drivers (which you should be doing really, because motion controllers aren't that useful otherwise.)

Setting one up to behave as though it was a standard windows controller of some kind is more difficult though.

I'm still looking at writing an entirely new set of windows drivers for Wii hardware, but primarily for the purposes of emulating keyboard/mouse/joystick/gamepad functions for general use.

The existing libraries aren't too bad if you build software directly around them, and as long as you aren't trying to work with some of the as of yet unimplemented features. (For instance, the Wii IR sensors can operate in a mode that provides a lot more information about the points it tracks, but to date I haven't found a driver that implements this.)

And yeah... Balance boards are pretty cheap. I got one for I think... about £9 second hand. The shop I got it from had about 30-40 of them... XD