Our friend [Johnny Lee] has been quite busy traveling and moving to a new city. He hasn't had time to put together any new videos because of this. He's been doing more Wiimote research though and has put together an extensive post about what he's working on and thinking about.

Right before the move, he put together a demo for throwable displays. The square pieces of foamcore have retro-reflective tape added to each of the corners. The Wiimote sees the orientation of the square and adjusts the projected image to fit perfectly; even when you pick it up and throw it. He used it to add a trail to an airhockey puck. Embedded above is an earlier project where he used the Wiimote to track a foldable display and project accordingly.

[Johnny] has also been working on 3D tracking with two or more Wiimotes. Since the Wiimote is camera based, stereo triangulation is simple. Check out the video below from the University of Cambridge that uses two Wiimotes for motion capture.

Have a look at [Johnny Lee]'s full post for even more Wiimote ideas.

Had enough Nintendo homebrew action yet? We haven't either. Especially not now that the doors to the homebrew scene have been blown open by The Homebrew Channel. Up to this point, the only way you could run homebrew on an unmodded Wii was the Twilight Hack, which leveraged a flaw in Twilight Princess save games. The Homebrew Channel lets you launch various homebrew apps with a useful GUI instead of performing the hack every time you want to run them. It can access apps stored on an SD card, a computer on the same network, and even USB Gecko. There is no USB flash drive or DVD support at the moment.

The Homebrew Channel can be loaded onto the Wii by running the Twilight Hack (don't worry, it'll probably be for the last time) with the Homebrew Channel Files in the root of your SD card. The Wii will reboot and then the channel will appear in the list. We tested it ourselves, and found that everything loaded properly from the SD card (we didn't try the other sources). We did run into a problem where it failed to load any of our homebrew apps or even reboot properly if a Gamecube memory card was in the slot, but it's an easy fix, just pull it out.

The devteam behind this release wanted to make things as easy and accessible as possible, so they included download links to the Twilight Hack, The Homebrew Channel, and even a homebrew software bundle to get you started. If you want more homebrew apps, head to Wiibrew.

[via everywhere]

If you thought [Johnny Lee] was done making us all buy Wiimotes, you were wrong. Now he's back showing off a simple, but incredibly effective VR head tracker. He swapped out the LED's on a pair of LED light safety glasses with a set of IR LEDs and used his PC/Wiimote combo to do the work. The demo is just fantastic. As usual, you can download the software from his project page.

[Johnny Lee]'s back again with his Wiimote interactive whiteboard. Commercial versions of these things are expensive and heavy. His technique doesn't even need a projector, just a computer, a Wiimote and a simple IR emitting pen. The pen is just a stylus with an infrared LED in the tip. Hit the video after the break, and you can grab the software from his site here.

Just in case you needed another way to pretend that you're in Minority Report, [Johnny Lee] sent in this video showing how to track your hands using the Wiimote's IR camera,an infrared LED array and a bit of reflective tape to improve the gain.

Chad brings us yet another use for the Wiimote: firefighting robot. The Wiimote acts as a communications gateway via bluetooth to a host PC. The IR sensor is used to detect the fire, and the commands from the host are passed along via the Wiimote expansion port. The robot is pretty basic, but the use of the Wiimote to relay bluetooth comms via I2C is a fantastic hack.

[UberNoober147] and [Carey] both sent in this round about hack. The Wiimote is interfaced with a PC. The PC outputs to a micro-controller circuit that outputs PlayStation 2 control signals. That's connected to a XFPS - a PS2 to XBox 360 controller converter. It's definitely round about, but it works.

This one's pretty simple, but anyone who's ever spent time tweaking an engine will appreciate it. [Kevin]'s been using a wiimote to measure the acceleration of his car. He put together a script to dump the accelerometer output to a CSV file, then graphed it with Excel. He notes that the accelerometer output isn't that precise, but it's good enough to give you feedback on your mods.

[F00 f00] sent in his friends lightgun wiimote mod. The IR sensor is carefully de-soldered and relocated to the barrel and the trigger is wired into the fire button. There's a video of game play, but you can hit it over at acidmods.

How, oh how did I miss this one? (original) A japanese hacker merged a powerglove with a wiimote. Need I say more? Seriously, who didn't want a powerglove when they came out? video of the thing in action is after the break.

Quick extra:
It turns out that the Wii Nunchuck is a great source for parts. It's got a 3-axis accelerometer, joystick and buttons for a mere $20 [chad]'s wrote a full how-to on turning a wii controller into a bluetooth transmitter and an interface for the wii nunchuck for the Arduino.

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[Mark] sent in his wireless classic nintendo controller project. He built a wireless NES and SNES controller to use with his Wii via the Gamecube port. He used off the shelf TX/RX hardware and used some PIC controllers to glue everything together. iPod batteries keep em powered and keep the weight down. He provides all the schematics and a walk through on constructing the SNES controller. The circuits are pretty simple, so it's definitely repeatable. This is almost enough to get me to buy a Wii.

-- video after the break.

The final part of Ben Heckendorn's Wii Laptop How-To is up. Somehow, Ben managed to get access to a laser cutter and a CNC machine (in friggin Iowa) and used em to create the new case for the Wii Laptop. Add dash of soldering, a few simple circuits and some clever case construction. Voila.

Part 2 of Ben Heck's Wii laptop How-To is up. The first half is all about the little touches, wiring switches, extending connectors, etc. The second half delves into designing the actual unit. Some of the comment's on Engadget seem to want a full bore step by step build, but fail to realize that he's really giving them the gold. Very few designers give away their intermediate design steps - But I am reminded of some of the Star Wars movie extras...

[Brian] sent in his Wiimote hacking project - he and his cohort used it to control an industrial sized robot arm. Then they armed it. Keep in mind that the sword is full size. [Aaron] ended up writing a basic pattern recognition program to get it to perform they way they wanted. Response time is a bit laggy, but not bad for a one-off project. I need my own industrial robot.