Using Hacked Wiimotes As Scientific Sensors

garg0yle writes "Scientists are repurposing Wiimotes as scientific sensors to help measure wind speed or evaporation from lakes, among other things. At about $40 per unit, the controller is much cheaper than specialized sensors. The scientists are still considering how to add storage and extend the battery life."

Comments

Extend the battery life

[Craig Davison]

There's a few Wii battery packs out there that allow the controller to be powered over USB with a standard A to mini-B cable. Here's one:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4978
Of course, if you drain the battery pack faster than you can recharge it, you might have a problem.

Re:It's not about how much it costs to make

[Mr. Freeman]

That, and the fact that a lot of scientific instruments are of the quality needed to do science. Sure, your bathroom scale is $20, but that won't do you any good when you need to measure masses on the order of one tenth of one milligram. Even a 3-place "precision" balance for $200 won't cut it for a lot of work. You need a 4-place analytical balance, which will run you about $4k.

Cheap sensors work great for things like wind speed and the water level of a lake because any small variation in these readings means absolutely nothing.

Now, as for the wiimote being an amazing tool, it's really not. It's being touted as such by scientists who apparently aren't actually examining how this thing works.

The case in the article mentioned using it to measure water level by using the IR camera on the sensor to record an IR beacon on a floaty thing in the water. You can do the same thing with a cheap ass digital camera and the same laptop that reads the data from the wiimote for about $10-15. They also mention putting wiimotes on a collapsing building to gather data. This is because the wiimote contains a chap accelerometer which you can actually buy on sparkfun.com for much cheaper than an entire wiimote.

Apparently these guys have never heard of embedded devices. The arduino, PIC microcontrollers, and NI DAQ devices have been around for years and would perfectly suit the purpose of data collection. As I'm attending an engineering university currently I've noticed something. Engineers seem to be much more up to date and logical about what's PRACTICAL. Sure, you could use a wiimote, but you could get an arduino, a flash drive, and some cheap accelerometers for about $50 and you could use it to collect AND PROCESS five times the amount of data and use it on orders of magnitude more applications.