2014-06-01

Bluetooth mouse from a Wii nunchuck

I never had a Nintendo Wii, but I got a nunchuck controller to play with. It has a joystick, two buttons, an accelerometer for orientation sensing and the third-party ones are dirt cheap. It turns out that it's really easy to talk to them from an Arduino too, because they speak I2C and as you would expect the protocol is well documented on the Internet. I used Adafruit's Trinket, Bluefruit EZ-Key and a 100 mAh lipo battery to turn the nunchuck into a Bluetooth mouse:



Here's a diagram of the connections, pin 1 on the Trinket goes to the RX pin on the Bluefruit and pins 0 and 2 are used for the I2C communication with the nunchuck:



On the software side, I used the WiiChuck class I found here, but I modified it to use the TinyWireM library for I2C. It is equivalent to the standard Arduino Wire library, but it runs on ATtiny chips like the one used by the Trinket. I also used this SendOnlySoftwareSerial library. Here's my sketch and the modified WiiChuck library.

I haven't found any clever use for the accelerometer inside the nunchuck yet, perhaps it could somehow be used for scrolling.

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