[VIDEO] Wiimote Driven FRC Bot

[Greg Marra]

Building on the Wiimote Driven VEX Bot, I present:

A Wiimote Driven FRC Bot!

In this video, watch 177's 2007 robot be driven around by a Wiimote!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=pxOfHIDkFPU

White paper type thing forthcoming.

Niiiiice! Very cool! I love this kind of innovation. I wonder if anyone will make use of a wiimote in a competition scenario...

[Leav]

Would Bluetooth be legal in the competition? seems more reliable than IR....

-Leav

[Mr. Freeman]

I'm 99% sure there's a rule explicitly prohibiting any other RF transmissions to control the robot.

The wii control is pretty cool though. Do you have plans to adapt this so that you can use the IR camera & "sensor" bar/accelerometer to control the robot?

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Mr. Freeman

I'm 99% sure there's a rule explicitly prohibiting any other RF transmissions to control the robot.

My solution is extremely not competition legal. It involves both a laptop and bluetooth. RF transmission is against the rules.

The wii control is pretty cool though. Do you have plans to adapt this so that you can use the IR camera & "sensor" bar/accelerometer to control the robot?

It would be pretty easy to add this in to the code. I'm not sure when I'll next get my hands on an FRC robot, but if someone wants to extend my code once I write it up and release it, I'd love to see it in action!

[Pavan Dave]

I'm assuming this is along the lines of someone playing Halo on an Xbox with a Wiimote? A bluetooth reciever, (drivers), OI, (transmit to RC via radio), robot moves.

After seeing the vid its pretty much along those lines... I bet a custom circuit is in call now that somebody has tried it. I bet that you can do what I said above to some degree. Develop a custom circuit that uses +5V (so you can drain juice from the OI) and can take the place of the computer by converting the wiimote signals. It is possible to make this "competition ready" but I don't think that it will be "all that and a bag of chips" IMHO.

This is pretty cool though!

[858member]

Nice job with the Wiimote. I'm sure that it took a while to program.

[yongkimleng]

Though I havent exactly had experience with an FRC sized robot, im sure the process of fixing this setup was pretty enjoyable

Personally played wiimote interfacing with WiiYourself (C+) and GlovePIE with much success.

I think next step would be to try to eliminate the need for a laptop - probably make some kind of embedded linux box (and name it WiiMote2Serial?) which decodes and sends relevant data in bytes to your robot controller via serial.