Weekend Slowdown: The Wiimote door-opener
While most Wiimote related hacks involve making the cute little controller a substitute for things that involve a degree of difficulty, like robot arms, synaesthesia inducing sonic applications, or crazy little mechanical things that play sports for you, this little controller hack treads the fine line between really cool and outright silly. Some group of ingenious Japanese tech-wizards, seemingly underwhelmed with their smartcard reliant FreeBSD door controller, rigged it so that it will accept Bluetooth input from Wiimotes. The result? A Wiimote door-opener.
See the Wiimote Door-Opener after the jump!
While most Wiimote-related hacks involve making the cute little controller a substitute for things that involve a degree of difficulty, like robot arms, synaesthesia-inducing sonic applications, or crazy little mechanical things that play sports for you, this little controller hack treads the fine line between really cool and outright silly. Some group of ingenious Japanese tech-wizards, seemingly underwhelmed with their smartcard reliant FreeBSD door controller, rigged it so that it will accept Bluetooth input from Wiimotes. The result? A Wiimote door-opener.
Just flick your wrist while holding the Wiimote, and the lock mechanism should release, allowing you to pass into the next room. The only problem now is trying to explain to everyone why you’re carrying a Wiimote around. Given the massive popularity of the Wii though, they’ll likely dismiss this as rampant fanboy-ism (or Otaku-ness since the device is in Japan after all.)
Engadget notes several problems with this setup. First, since the system authenticates via Bluetooth addresses, security isn’t that high. Second, they’d rather have the “doorputer” be run on Linux.
Above are images of the thing in action, and a tech diagram of the project. Below is a video of the project and a “via” link that should direct you folks to a translated version of a post about the said project. Beware of engrish.
About The Author
