Creative Controller V3! – Control playback with your wiimote
So, for those who haven’t been following long at home, this is the third creative controller that I have put together. I promise this isn’t going to become a “Combine X with Y and use it to control Final cut Pro!” blog. This one is clean and simple so I figured I’d put it up and share how it works.
This uses a Wii remote, a bluetooth dongle (if you don’t have one built into your computer) and a copy of the free app DarwiinRemote
Darwiin Remote receives commands from the wii remote and converts them into keypresses. When you first fire up the app hit the “find Wiimote” button and then press the 1 & 2 buttons.
It will soon find the remote and start showing you the x,y and z axis accelerometer data. That doesn’t really matter to us, but it does look cool. Now go into the preferences in DarwiinRemote>Preferences and create a new preset. Feel free to bind your keys any which way you want, but here is how I did mine.
Depending on how much control you really want to give up you can make the controller start/stop, or go whole hog and add scrolling, markers, and cuts. If you really want to you can set the tilt sensor to control your mouse too! Its a very touchy and complicated way to control a mouse, but it’s still fun to try. One quirk about how this app seems to work is that when you restart it you will need to go to system preferences>bluetooth and delete the last instance of the wii remote. The other quirk is that the app seems to be unable to save the “space” key press. So if you want a button to send the space bar you will need to retype that into the Darwiinremote preferences panel every time you start it up. I just went for k / l to work around that glitch.
You can get the wii remotes from amazon for under $40. Most laptops have bluetooth built in, so this could be a $40 project! I could see this being super useful for all kinds of remote triggering work. Use it to start and stop Pro Tools sessions, to tell a tethered camera to fire, or even to do the same job as an apple remote pausing and rewinding music and videos. If you come up with an interesting use for a wiimote, let me know in the comments!
Thanks for the post, I did even see the key preferences menu until I found this article. I’m going to use it to control some presentation software at a kiosk.