Use your Wiimote in Windows

I bought a Nintendo Wii when it came out. As you might know you do not use game pads to play the games but the so called Wiimote which looks very much like a TV remote control and uses Bluetooth to communicate with the core system.

Carl Kenner developed the software Glove Pie which can be used to control games and applications with gestures, speech and other input devices.

Carl added Wiimote support to Glove (Glove Programmable Input Emulator) Pie which lets you use the Wiimote and the Nunchuck, the secondary controller, to control applications in Windows.

You need to have Bluetooth enabled to communicate with the Wiimote and Nunchuck though. Just download and start the Glove Pie software. After that you can start adding scripts that support the two input devices.

I found a forum post that had some good examples for scripts that you could use to use the buttons of the Wii devices for example:

• Up = Wiimote.Up
• Down = Wiimote.Down
• Left = Wiimote.Left
• Right = Wiimote.Right
• A = Wiimote.A
• B = Wiimote.B
• One = Wiimote.One
• Two = Wiimote.Two
• Home = Wiimote.Home
• Minus = Wiimote.Minus
• Equals = Wiimote.Plus

Some scripts for the Glove Pie can be found at Joseph Coulstons website. The two scripts that he makes available enable Wiimote support on Google Earth and display the battery level of the Wiimote on the screen.

It is quite possible that we will soon see some games come out that work specifically with the Wiimote connected to your computer.

Update: Glove Pie has not been updated since January 2010, which may indicate that the project has been put on ice or completely abandoned by its developer. One of the last blog entries speaks of a new version of the program in 2011 which has not been released in that year. The project homepage has changed as well from Google code to its own root domain, and we have changed the links in this article accordingly.

A good starting point is the documentation that the  author makes available on his website. There you find scripting examples and everything else to get you started.

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