Turning a wiimote into a CNC pendant?

First off, I’m proud to announce that the kikori open source gantry router is up and running!
While testing it, I realized that having a wireless pendant to jog it for homing would be really handy, and it occurred to me that a wiimote has the right number of buttons. Does anyone have any experience getting a wiimote to work with ubuntu? All I’d need to do is map keystrokes to the various buttons. Also, any recommendations for a bluetooth dongle that’ll play well with ubuntu?

Thanks!

Judah

That’s terrific, I’m really looking forward to seeing it running.

I had a bluetooth module around here somewhere, but it has disappeared, surprise. I’ll keep an eye open for it.

There are a number of drivers you can use, I think this looks promising:

From #emc -
SWPadnos: if it hits the input event layer, and/or acts like a HID (which it probably does), then one of those HAL drivers will be what you want

SWPadnos: mapping it as keys means that you have to insure the proper window has focus. using HAL connections to halui means that the buttons act as though they were physically connected to certain functions

Thanks for the links!
I got a bluetooth dongle, installed the software on my home machine, and figured out how to configure it.
However, when I tried to do the same for the machine I’m using to run the kikori, I run into an issue when I try to run the ‘wminput’ program; it says ‘unable to open uinput’. ‘sudo wminput’ yields the same results. I can run wmgui just fine.
Thoughts? I’ll probably bring the box down to the hive tomorrow evening to see if anyone can figure it out.

Judah

Looks like the uinput module may not be loaded. Try this:

lsmod | grep uinput

If you don’t get any output, that’s the problem. A

sudo modprobe uinput

should solve the issue. More links:

Works! Thanks Chris!
Will you be at the hive tonight?

Sweet! If you have notes on how you ended up configuring the wiimote to talk to EMC, that would be great to have.

Sadly, I will not be there tonight, but will tomorrow.

It was actually pretty straightforward; I just mapped the existing hot-keys to the wiimote’s buttons. The only thing that I haven’t figured out how to do is map a button to a combination of keys… although I just had a thought. I’ll let you all know if it works.

Judah