[elearning] a DIY IWB with a WiiMote

[Roland Gesthuizen]

 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/2918695790/>
 WiiMote experiment at
school<http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/2918695790/>by
plakboek <http://www.flickr.com/people/plakboek/>
Our school is installing a 2Touch <http://www.twotouch.com/> Interactive
WhiteBoard (IWB) system (locally made) that use a short throw, wide screen
projector, optical sensors and suprisingly, no software drivers. Last year
I saw this cool TED video about building your own dirt-cheap
IWB<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html>.
This got me curious ..

The idea of linking a WiiMote with a digital projector this way is credit to
the inspiring work by Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon
University<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ejohnny/projects/wii/>.
Thank you goes to Graham Cahill who encouraged me to give this a workout in
my classroom, even organising his son to build some IR pens for us to try.

Today we managed to build our own WiiMote IWB for only $40 of trouble. We
managed to product some interesting drawings on a whiteboard displaying an
image from a digital projector using a home-made infrared pen. My students
and I then had some fun drawing with the open source software TuxPaint on
our whiteboard and this free wiimote
software<http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard>on my Apple
MacBook.

You can view the full slideshow of
drawings<http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/tags/wiimote/show/>that
we easily made. In all, it was a nice activity to explain the
different
technologies used to communicate and network between all the different
devices in this setup; BlueTooth, Wireless and Infrared. I know that we are
not the first to try this. It also now seem to make a lot of sense for us to
have considered an optical based system with open software instead of a
pressure sensitive one using proprietary software and all the nonsense of
vendor lockin.

Not a bad way folks, for us to celebrate Software Freedom Day
2008<http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/>with some important lessons
learned along the way. :-)

-- 
Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
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