/wiiuse

Fork of WiiUse Wii Remote access library focused on Mac support

Primary LanguageCGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

WiiUse README

Semi-Official Fork, located at http://github.com/rpavlik/wiiuse

Issue/bug tracker: https://github.com/rpavlik/wiiuse/issues

Mailing list: wiiuse@librelist.com - just email to subscribe. See http://librelist.com/browser/wiiuse/ for archives and http://librelist.com/ for more information.

Changelog: https://github.com/rpavlik/wiiuse/blob/master/CHANGELOG.mkd

About

Wiiuse is a library written in C that connects with several Nintendo Wii remotes. Supports motion sensing, IR tracking, nunchuk, classic controller, Balance Board, and the Guitar Hero 3 controller. Single threaded and nonblocking makes a light weight and clean API.

Distributed under the GPL 3+.

This is a friendly fork, prompted by apparent non-maintained status of upstream project but proliferation of ad-hoc forks without project infrastructure. Balance board support has been merged from TU-Delft cross-referenced with other similar implementations in embedded forks of WiiUse in other applications. Additional community contributions have since been merged. Hopefully GitHub will help the community maintain this project more seamlessly now.

Patches and improvements are greatly appreciated - the easiest way to submit them is to fork the repository on GitHub and make the changes, then submit a pull request. The "fork and edit this file" button on the web interface should make this even simpler.

Authors

Fork Maintainer: Ryan Pavlik rpavlik@iastate.edu or abiryan@ryand.net

Original Author: Michael Laforest < para > < thepara (--AT--) g m a i l [--DOT--] com >

Additional Contributors:

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Audience

This project is intended for developers who wish to include support for the Nintendo Wii remote with their third party application.

Platforms and Dependencies

Wiiuse currently operates on both Linux and Windows. You will need:

For Linux:

  • The kernel must support bluetooth

  • The BlueZ bluetooth drivers must be installed

  • If compiling, you'll need the BlueZ dev files (Debian/Ubuntu package libbluetooth-dev)

For Windows:

  • Bluetooth driver (tested with Microsoft's stack with Windows XP SP2)

  • If compiling, Microsoft Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK)

For Mac:

  • Mac OS X 10.2 or newer (to have the Mac OS X Bluetooth protocol stack)

For either platform:

  • If compiling, CMake is needed to generate a makefile/project

Compiling

You need SDL and OpenGL installed to compile the (optional) SDL example.

Linux & Mac:

$ mkdir build

$ cd build

$ ccmake .. [-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local] [-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release]

OR

$ cmake-gui ..

$ make [target]

If target is omitted then everything is compiled.

Where target can be any of the following:

  • wiiuse - Compiles libwiiuse.so

  • wiiuseexample - Compiles wiiuse-example

  • wiiuseexample-sdl - Compiles wiiuse-sdl

  • doc - Generates doxygen-based API documentation in HTML and PDF format in docs-generated

Become root.

# make install

libwiiuse.so is installed to CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/lib wiiuse-example and wiiuse-sdl are installed to CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/bin

Windows:

The CMake GUI can be used to generate a Visual Studio solution.

You need the install the Windows DDK (driver development kit) to compile wiiuse. You can download this from here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ddk/default.mspx

You might also need to install the latest Windows SDK.

Using the Library

To use the library in your own program you must first compile wiiuse as a module. Include include/wiiuse.h in any file that uses wiiuse.

For Linux you must link libwiiuse.so ( -lwiiuse ). For Windows you must link wiiuse.lib. When your program runs it will need wiiuse.dll.

Known Issues

On Windows using more than one wiimote (usually more than two wiimotes) may cause significant latency.

If you are going to use Motion+, make sure to call wiiuse_poll or wiiuse_update in a loop for some 10-15 seconds before enabling it. Ideally you should be checking the status of any expansion (nunchuk) you may have connected as well. Otherwise the extra expansion may not initialize correctly - the initialization and calibration takes some time.

Mac OS X

Sometimes you may not be able to connect to the device, even if it is discoverable. If that happens open the Bluetooth Preferences, select the Nintendo device on the list and remove it (by clicking on the minus sign). Close the Preference Pane and try again.

Acknowledgements by Michael Laforest

http://wiibrew.org/

This site and their users have contributed an immense amount of information about the wiimote and its technical details. I could not have written this program without the vast amounts of reverse engineered information that was researched by them.

Nintendo

Of course Nintendo for designing and manufacturing the Wii and Wii remote.

BlueZ

Easy and intuitive bluetooth stack for Linux.

Thanks to Brent for letting me borrow his Guitar Hero 3 controller.

Known Forks/Derivative Versions

The last "old upstream" version of WiiUse was 0.12. A number of projects forked or embedded that version or earlier, making their own improvements. A (probably incomplete) list follows, split between those whose improvements are completed integrated into this new mainline version, and those whose improvements have not yet been ported/merged into this version. An eventual goal is to integrate all appropriate improvements (under the GPL 3+) back into this mainline community-maintained "master fork" - contributions are greatly appreciated.

Forks that have been fully integrated:

Forks not yet fully integrated:

Other Links

Original project: