I linked the Wiimote horse controller in yesterdays extra, but today [Mark] sent us a short and sweet How-to. Essentially, he's using the Wiimote taped to the horse as a joystick to play Need for Speed on the laptop connected to his big screen. Hit the read link for his write up.Here's how to but together your own Wiimote racing horse:
1. Buy, Beg, Borrow Steal a Spring Horse
2. Install Blue tooth adapter HW & SW Drivers
3. Sync WiiMote with PC
4. Affix WiiMote to Horse (I used painter's tape to Horse's hind quarters (See 00:27 in video)
5. Install GlovePie
6. Load joystick script in GlovePie (included in GlovePie)
7. Load Need for Speed (PC Game)
8. Configure the controls in NFS by moving the Horse when assigning keys for:
1. Accelerate
2. Brake
3. Left
4. Right
5. Change View (Optional)
9. Hook up to Large Display (Optional but preferable)
10. Move Furniture out of the way
11. Start Game
12. Lean forward, Elbows in, hands tightly gripping handle
13. Have Fun
Note: I will post a detailed How-to/Video at the first available opportunity.
Back Story - Idea:
My sister-in-law, K., keeps her house pretty organized, no clutter, nothing out of place, no messing with the Feng shui. My wife and I thought we would mess with her. So we placed a spring hobby horse outside her house at midnight. The next morning as her kids opened their front door they saw the spring horse staring at them from their front yard. You would have thought it was Christmas by their reaction.
Two or three weeks later, though her kids loved the horse, K. could not take the clutter of a horse in her living room, so she paid my two sons a dollar each to carry the horse back across the street to my house.
When I walked into the house after work one day the spring horse was sitting in my foyer. I had been playing with the Wii Remote a lot with the PC lately, and the idea just came to me. I discussed it with co-workers then next day, during a network outage, as we were just sitting around chatting.
Then that night it took about 5 minutes to modify the GlovePie - Generic Joystick Driver script. I haphazardly taped the Wii mote to horse's rear. I then made the following poor quality video with my phone.
(If you watch that video please take into account I was both sleep deprived and a little excited at what I thought was a cool little hack.)
1. Lol...Nice! It looks like a very unique idea for making use of Wiimote/PC control. I haven't found many "good" uses for it, but this looks promising...now if you could convert the horse into a more "car" looking thing, fine tune the controls a bit, you could have your own arcade-style racing game.
Though I still can't wait for someone to make a real Windows Wiimote driver, because GlovePIE and WiinRemote just aren't very good...I mean, Linux already has good Wiimote drivers (real drivers), but Windows only has "fake drivers" (user-mode programs acting like drivers).
Posted at 12:42AM on Dec 2nd 2007 by CalcProgrammer1