Wiilson: Wii-Skybot extreme (Skybot + Wii + PWM)

A couple of days ago I mentioned this in the post about extending libStargate for a class assignment we had. The team was formed by Miguel, Gonzalo and myself, and we received a pretty good grade, by the way. I wanted to write again after having some patches sent to the main author of libStargate by the end of this week, but it turns out I won’t be able to properly test them until after that. Since a lot of friends have been having problems with their own projects, ours is going to be temporarily cannibalized until their time is up. Wish them luck! ;)

Anyway, I’ll post again once  I have the things properly tested and I’ve spoken to the people of IEArobotics. For now, here is the link to download Wiilson if you want to try it out.

As mentioned earlier, it is just a PWM Wiimote implementation to control a Skybot. The Wiimote is interfaced thanks to the excellent pywii library, Orienting the Wiimote makes the bot move and it goes faster or slower depending on the inclination of the controller. Changing from mode ‘A’ to ‘B’ (or ’1′ to ’2′) overrides this behavior and controls the bot with the direction keys of the Wiimote, being able to alter speeds with the ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ buttons. It’s not pretty, but it is a quick hack and works fine. If you want something better you’ll have to wait for the release of pybot, a Python module to control (extended) libStargate managed robots with PWM support. The only class present right now is to control the Skybot as it is out of the box, so PWM support is software based -you’d have to rewire it if you wanted a hardware version of this, much better but totally out of the scope-.

Coming up soon, at least as soon as our bot gets de-cannibalized if that is even a word!

By the way… I think I’m getting to love this stuff. I’ll have to buy a Skypic or Arduino for myself. You can’t ever play around enough with these things. And to think it was always there and I never knew!