December 1, 2007

Submission to Hack a Day

Below is my submission to Hack-a-Day, one of my favoirite sites. Keep your fingers crossed that we’ll see it there soon.

Wiimote attached to a Spring Horse controlling Need for Speed on a PC(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBV8lx5qUv4)

A quick How-To summary:
  1. Buy, Beg, Borrow or Steal a Spring Horse
  2. Install Bluetooth adapter HW & SW Drivers
  3. Sync WiiMote with PC
  4. Affix WiiMote to Horse (I used painter’s tape to the horse’s hind quarters (See 00:27 in video)
  5. Install GlovePie
  6. Load joystick script in GlovePie (included in GlovePie)
  7. Load Need for Speed (PC Game)
  8. Config controls in NFS by moving the Horse when assigning keys for:
    1. Accelerate
    2. Brake
    3. Left
    4. Right
    5. Change View (Optional) Hook up to Large Display (Optional but preferable)
  9. Move Furniture out of the way
  10. Start Game
  11. Lean forward, Elbows in, hands tightly gripping handle
  12. Have Fun
Note: I will post a detailed How-to/Video at the first available opportunity.

Back Story - How I got the Idea:
My sister-in-law, K., keeps her house pretty organized, no clutter, nothing out of place, no messing with the Feng Shui (link to http://fengshui.happyhomezone.com/livingroom/). So my wife and I thought we would mess with her. So we placed a spring hobby horse outside her house at midnight. The next morning as her kids opened their front door they saw the spring horse staring at them from their front yard. You would have thought it was Christmas by their reaction.

Two or three weeks later, though her kids loved the horse, K. could not take the clutter of a horse in here living room, she paid my two sons a dollar each to carry the horse back across the street to my house.

When I walked into the house after work one day the spring horse was sitting in my foyer. I had been playing with the Wii Remote a lot with the PC lately, and the idea just came to me. I discussed it with co-workers then next day, during a network outage, as we were just sitting around chatting.

Then that night it took about 5 minutes to modify a the GlovePie - Generic Joystick Driver script. I haphazardly taped the Wii mote to horse’s rear. I then make the following poor quality video with my phone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLqM1C9JPro
(If you watch that video please take into account I was both sleep deprived and a little excited at what I thought was a cool little hack.)


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Thanks, Mark

P.S. I love this site. (But everyone says that)