Wiimote Car Acceleration Monitoring

Categories: PC Connect, Wiimote Hack.

No need for expensive acceleration monitoring hardware when you can simply strap a Wiimote in for the ride.

“I got this idea after seeing some physics class use the wiimote in some kinda pendulum experiment.

Why not use the wiimote’s built in 3-axis accelerometers to measue g-forces, acceleration and even calculate my own 0-60mph times!

So I did. I wrote a script to dump all the g-force readings from the wiimote to a comma separated value file, then did some post processing in MS Excel, and voila, I can see every bump, every curve, my acceleration and braking, and even calculated my current speed using high school physics (v=a*t)

I even convinced my coworker to take me out in his E46 M3 to measure his SMG’s performance

I admit, it’s not super accurate since the wiimote spits out G readings rounded to two decimal places. It also provides other acceleration readings in finer granularity, but I couldn’t figure out what metric it was recording in. I used Gs since I knew it was just the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s/s).”

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7 comments.

Ali Qureshi

Comment on September 15th, 2007.

I’ve got the same laptop!

Gringo Loco

Comment on September 24th, 2007.

Do you have this script and Excel File for download? I’d love to try this thing.

admin

Comment on September 24th, 2007.

Click on the link to go to the authors site. I am sure you should find what you are looking for there.

Elias Flores

Comment on November 25th, 2007.

can somebody put a easy wii-mote led mod
PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
somebody answer

calandril

Comment on December 13th, 2007.

huh?… please be more specific… or make sure the words you string together make sense in that order. what do u want the mod to DO?

Flores

Comment on December 29th, 2007.

http://www.slip-angle.com

Check this out for a useful analysis program.
MapMaker can easily be adapted to accept input from almost any g-force or GPS based data logging system.

Josh

Comment on August 13th, 2008.

G is easy to calculate

We know that x and y are at 0 g’s when the wiimote is at rest as seen in the picture. Z is the axis going up and down. Z is noticeably higher number than x and y (which should be equal). x and y is 0g, and Z is +1g.

From this, we can calibrate to 0 and 1g, and by component forces, we can detect tilt of x, y, and z axes.

All we need is a definition of origin and knowledge of velocity (set to 0 to make things easy). From there, one would be able to record where you’re at from the reference position.

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