Using Hacked Wiimotes As Scientific Sensors 110
garg0yle writes "Scientists are repurposing Wiimotes as scientific sensors to help measure wind speed or evaporation from lakes, among other things. At about $40 per unit, the controller is much cheaper than specialized sensors. The scientists are still considering how to add storage and extend the battery life."
Is this what the University of East Anglia is usin (Score:2, Funny)
to detect global warming?
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The wiimotes are being used to keep this article on the front page for days!! I keep refreshing and nothing new comes up - and this is from both my home and work computers. What is going on in Slashdot land?
"scientists" (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems like more of an engineering challenge than a scientific one.
Re:"scientists" (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes there is an explicit division of labor, sometimes the same person performs both functions.
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The first time you do something it's science, the second time it's engineering, the third time it's just being a technician.
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Everything's an engineering challenge, it all depends on how you look at it. :)
Sometimes that's half the fun.
The other half is enjoying the result.
Come on, let your mind sink to the gutter. It's more fun here. :)
Oh Science. (Score:5, Insightful)
“There are probably better ways to measure wind, but it was a day well-spent,” Hut said. “I really felt the need to solder something.”
A day well-spent indeed! There's nothing like spending a day to save a few dollars by not having to buy a specialized sensor. Sounds like my Master's research; why buy good equipment when grad students can spend ages building a poor imitation of it? Still, those days are usually the most fun part of "science" and certainly afford excellent learning opportunities.
Re:Oh Science. (Score:5, Funny)
There's nothing like spending a day to save a few dollars by not having to buy a specialized sensor.
They won't be saving any money when they get hit with the DMCA lawsuit ;)
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They've done nothing to break the DMCA.
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Except many other companies have been playing around with using Wiimotes, and software is freely available to use your wiimote on your computer and no DMCA notice has been served. Nintendo typically doesn't serve DMCAs notices like shadier companies do.
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http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wii/en_na/privacyEULA.jsp [nintendo.com]
The agreement only restricts what devices/software you can use with the Wii console, not the controller.
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DMCA == software/data
Wiimote == hardware
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It does contain software, but if you don't modify it and just use it "as is" then you are hardly messing things up.
Just download Wiimotelib [brianpeek.com] and you can start hack your application.
And I recently succeeded in interfacing the Wiimote with a Windows Mobile - using the StoneStreet Bluetooth stack, so it's not impossible - even if the general consensus until now has been that it isn't possible.
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A day well-spent indeed! There's nothing like spending a day to save a few dollars by not having to buy a specialized sensor.
Looking at the image, I have to wonder why a lab would need to buy or build a "Toy plastic boat" sensor of any type.
There is a toy plastic boat right there. I saw it. I'm surprised they couldn't find a grad student capable of doing that. Really speaks poorly for the quality of our education system.
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A day well-spent indeed! There's nothing like spending a day to save a few dollars by not having to buy a specialized sensor.
Looking at the image, I have to wonder why a lab would need to buy or build a "Toy plastic boat" sensor of any type.
There is a toy plastic boat right there. I saw it. I'm surprised they couldn't find a grad student capable of doing that. Really speaks poorly for the quality of our education system.
It floats, cost €2, and they could add an LED really easily. Then they can measure the water level in the tank as the water evaporates, which was the problem they were trying to solve (and the data is better than using the "proper" instruments).
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Then they can measure the water level in the tank as the water evaporates, which was the problem they were trying to solve (and the data is better than using the "proper" instruments).
But can it measure the WOOSH?
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Not to mention the fact that with a day worth of salary you can buy a tenfold of these things...
It's like driving ten extra miles to a store where you can get a 5 dollar discount. "Yeah but I save 5 dollers!" -"Yeah and you pay 6 dollar worth of fuel, you complete retard!"
Sorry for the obviousness and the rant, but hey, this is the internet :)
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Let's break out this charge and see how it really works (yes, I'm being a pedantic twit, but it's worth the effort in this case):
The average price per gallon of gas in the U.S. is $2.65. My car, a 1998 Honda, gets, on average, 33 mph doing my normal driving. If I have to drive to an extra ten miles to save $5 on something
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If it costs you $6 in fuel to drive 10 miles, I would say you are the retard.
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Well maybe I set a bad example. Incorrect example.
But you'll just have to read between the lines.
I will not deny that you and smooth wombat are indeed correct ;)
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There's nothing like spending a day to save a few dollars by not having to buy a specialized sensor. Sounds like my Master's research; why buy good equipment when grad students can spend ages building a poor imitation of it?
research assistant n. see indentured servant
I know that "why" is a rhetorical question. But... too bad grad students don't work on grant budgets. :-) Having wrestled with said budgets in Excel (before someone with a bussiness degree took over), I can tell you that the amount of money allocated to equipment tends to be rather flexible. Any give in the budget tends to be used for junket... er, travel expenses for attending scientific conferences.
It's not about how much it costs to make (Score:4, Insightful)
...this equipment can run $500 or more...
The scientific equipment is more expensive because laboratories are willing to pay more, and have the money. Gamers aren't willing to pay $500 for a controller.
Look here: Digikey [digikey.com] has 18000 pressure sensors available. I picked one [digikey.com] at random, and it can measure pressure up to 115 psi, which is about 60 meters deep in water. It only costs $12. I could make you the serial port/USB interface for like 20 bucks.
Scientists only pay that much because they are willing to pay that much.
Re:It's not about how much it costs to make (Score:5, Insightful)
However, you're underestimating the cost of time. Mass production decreases both the cost and time of making a specific product (or combination of products).
Re:It's not about how much it costs to make (Score:5, Funny)
However, the cost of a grad student per hour is asymptotic at $0.
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So, around £1.50 per hour. £10 will get you a lot of beer at 90p a pint.
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I would hope that students actually paying for their advanced degrees wouldn't be expected to do so much tedious work.
and it's not entirely true (Score:2)
I work with a number of professors at several universities, and they have to pay their grad students for time spent on the projects we fund. I don't know what the hourly rates are but they're enough that when one project temporarily ran out of funding, the grad student took a job waiting tables at a restaurant. This suggests that the pay is in a similar range as what a waiter makes. Not a lot, but not $0 either.
I remember it well because the prof told me that when he got his next funding increment he had
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Sounds like Nintendo could make some pretty nifty scientific instruments just my making small changes to the Wiimotes and mass producing them.
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Which brings us back to the problem of a market that is too small.
Not enough people are doing high-end research to make it worth Nintendo's (or anyone's) effort to produce them on a mass scale.
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Too bad it doesn't also decrease the cost of lab equipment for researchers.
Re:It's not about how much it costs to make (Score:5, Informative)
Cheap sensors work great for things like wind speed and the water level of a lake because any small variation in these readings means absolutely nothing.
Now, as for the wiimote being an amazing tool, it's really not. It's being touted as such by scientists who apparently aren't actually examining how this thing works.
The case in the article mentioned using it to measure water level by using the IR camera on the sensor to record an IR beacon on a floaty thing in the water. You can do the same thing with a cheap ass digital camera and the same laptop that reads the data from the wiimote for about $10-15. They also mention putting wiimotes on a collapsing building to gather data. This is because the wiimote contains a chap accelerometer which you can actually buy on sparkfun.com for much cheaper than an entire wiimote.
Apparently these guys have never heard of embedded devices. The arduino, PIC microcontrollers, and NI DAQ devices have been around for years and would perfectly suit the purpose of data collection. As I'm attending an engineering university currently I've noticed something. Engineers seem to be much more up to date and logical about what's PRACTICAL. Sure, you could use a wiimote, but you could get an arduino, a flash drive, and some cheap accelerometers for about $50 and you could use it to collect AND PROCESS five times the amount of data and use it on orders of magnitude more applications.
Re:It's not about how much it costs to make (Score:4, Interesting)
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Solution: collaborate.
I know, I know. Obviously beyond any real-world scenario in academia.
Join the real world sometime... (Score:2)
Solution: collaborate.
I know, I know. Obviously beyond any real-world scenario in academia.
Actually, collaboration is very strong in US universities. At work we are constantly hearing about some research project or other being helped out by someone from a different department who brings new or unique skills or methodologies to the project.
What is not favored however, is falling behind schedule on your grant-funded research because you're waiting for some weenie to hack together an experimental sensor from scratch when you can go down to Gamestop and buy one for $39.
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Re:It's not about how much it costs to make (Score:4, Insightful)
So the accelerometer set up you propose would cost about the same as the wiimote only they'd have to build it from scratch and write some software for it? Plus, why would you want to process the data on board? You're not doing anything with it immediately. I see your point about the camera though. What res are wiimote cameras?
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What res are wiimote cameras?
128x96 @ 100hz.
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Your argument about writing software is moot. The wiimote doesn't work right out of the box either. You have to write just as much, if not more, software to interface with it.
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Scientists only pay that much because they are willing to pay that much.
No, that is not the reason. It is essential that scientific experiments can be repeated by scientists at other universities. Because different sensors can take readings differently, that means the equipment used must be readily available to all. It also requires that a listing of equipment used must be included in any publications that result from the acquired data. Saying that you captured measurement 'x' with some custom hardware is only acceptable if you had a really good reason for requiring custom
Other Sensor Platforms (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the pricing of scientific instrumentation is based largely upon the limited number of devices produced. The folks who make sensors really do not care too much about the price and are looking at recovering their development, manufacturing and marketing costs off of very small sales quantities.
A case in point; I work with AMI (SmartGrid) systems for measuring water and electricity consumption. These devices have a surprising level of sophistication, very long battery lives (10-20 years off of a Li-Ion battery) and can store a data-point every fifteen minutes and report it back across a radio network. I "know" the manufacturing costs are down in the $30-60 range for each device. The manufacturers are all anxious to get customers (utilities) to spend their millions on projects to put SmartGrid technologies into cities so the more you buy, the cheaper they get. The data is frequently coming from "absolute encoders" on water meters and less frequently, from pulse encoders that generate a certain number of pulses per 1000's of gallons (the device counts them up, multiplies them by a K factor and gives you a corrected value for gallons of water consumed).
The Nintendo Wi is a good example. How many millions of the Wi devices are made? If they were $250 each there would not be many consumers buying them so they mass-produce and keep the prices low. You see the same effect when you hear about banks of PlayStation 3's being used in clusters for supercomputing.
Re:Other Sensor Platforms (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Other Sensor Platforms (Score:5, Interesting)
And the flipside happens too - scientific instruments are used for cooking. In this case, it's for cooking delicate foods using a thermal immersion circulator to cook sous-vide.
http://gizmodo.com/5346014/what-is-this [gizmodo.com]
It's used because it's the best way to do precision temperature control.
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Just so you know, you can build a circulator and precision controller for quite a bit less than the lab equivalent. A couple of years ago, I built exact that kind of sous vide immersion cooking unit for under $30, plus $70 for two controllers, because I was interested in comparing a factory-made PID controller and J-type thermocouple (~$40 incl. S/H on eBay) with a microcontroller and thermistors (~$30). Result: either alone would've done the job just fine.
Actually, since I do electronics/hardware tinkering
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It's really a matter of how well your needs actually match the design. In some cases the price is worth it (or even necessary). In other cases where your requirements for accuracy, reliability, or ease of use are much less than the design goals, it's an outrageous price but the lower cost part with the looser design constraints doesn't exist. That's when it's time to get hacking.
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Absolutely correct. You see the same thing happen with test equipment that must be periodically calibrated to NIST traceable standards. I had a "deadweight tester" (a very arcane piece of test equipment for accurately measuring pressures) that had to have it's brass weights tested to make sure they weighed "exactly" the right amount. We were even discouraged from polishing the brass weights as the polishing process would remove minute amounts of brass.
When my former employer offered to send my DVM (digital
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It seems like Arduino+XBee is the answer for stuff like this, at about $100/3pk of ATM328+Xbee boards; you get a repeating mesh-network and yes, very good battery life. I have a hard time believing that using Wiimotes and then adding battery to them and so on is going to be any cheaper, especially if you're calculating for the cost of development time.
Scientific Value of Wii, PS3, XBox 360? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm curious on the non-game advances the Wii, PS3, and XBox 360 has provided for the community.
The Wii advances via it's mass-produced controller, the PS3 advances via mass-produced mini-computer, the XBox 360... um... (need some help here).
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Of course you don't seem to realize that many of those third party storage units were being used to create exploits for games, or that not all 3rd party storage units were affected by the update.
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The 3rd party peripherals, those are just a pure money grab. There's no reason for the drives to cost as much as they do other than Microsoft wanting to exploit lock-in.
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Xbox 360 is pretty well DRM locked down, so no help is forthcoming.
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Re:Scientific Value of Wii, PS3, XBox 360? (Score:4, Funny)
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the XBox 360... um... (need some help here).
Provides endless comedy with its RRODs, massive overheating power brick, and user-phobic online gaming service.
details on the wind sensor (Score:1, Interesting)
are there any details for the wind sensor? It's only mentioned in the story but not linked to any additional information.
Anything goes... (Score:3, Insightful)
...thats the beauty of science, we're not limited to "have to", but more what we could do - "because we can".
In amateur science circles, we also used commercially available TV-tuners as spectrum analyzers, instead of purchasing a commercial test-instrument that cost up to a 100.000 dollars, it could be made to perform pretty close and pretty well with some external circuitry for a few hundred bucks, made it affordable for the radio-amateur, science amateurs, and science students everywhere.
Absolutely LOVE to see people use the resources like the Wiimote like that, excellent!
So yeah - sky's the limit!
fun but probably not that accurate (Score:1)
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In my experience, doing some sensor systems with cheap sensors and expensive sensors, the difference is that cheap ones can be fast or accurate, while good ones can be both. Because you can average data and apply statistical methods to eliminate noise, a long integration time can get you very good precision (as long as your not doing an integrator... using an iPhone as a position sensor won't work, since you can't average the acceleration to get it).
In this case, a cheap sensor is going to work quite well
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And forgetting my high school science classes, averaging gives you precision, not accuracy. Accuracy is a whole other issue, but its not very different between cheap and expensive sensors, and calibration can eliminate the issues.
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In my experience, doing some sensor systems with cheap sensors and expensive sensors, the difference is that cheap ones can be fast or accurate, while good ones can be both. ... Its really a matter of knowing what you need. In many cases a cheap sensor works really well.
Using cheap sensors can allow you to validate your hypothesis. This can in turn help you justify the additional expense of calibrated and more precise sensors to accurately describe the relationship observed. (You can also use spares of the cheap sensor equipment to play games and blow off steam while the experiment is running; Mario Kart anyone? :)
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Exactly, you do get what you pay for, so why pay for more than you need. I haven't RTFA but the type of science they are doing probably doesn't need to be all that accurate to get meaningful conclusions.
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Without a doubt. But if the incredible detail will just be discarded in favor of a simple trend anyway, you'll be paying a lot for nothing.
Funny coincidence (Score:5, Interesting)
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Extend the battery life (Score:5, Informative)
There's a few Wii battery packs out there that allow the controller to be powered over USB with a standard A to mini-B cable. Here's one:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4978 [dealextreme.com]
Of course, if you drain the battery pack faster than you can recharge it, you might have a problem.
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Well then don't drain it. Get the 5V off the USB and give 3V to the terminals directly.
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What I found interesting was that they were able to figure out the relatively complicated parts of performing the measurements and recording them in a way they can use later, and yet they still haven't worked out a larger battery?
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Many many years ago, my dad got annoyed with constantly replacing the little coin cells in process timers at work - about one a week on average. So with the aid of a couple of short bits of wire and some hot-melt glue he stuck alkaline D cells on the back of each one. Over twenty years later (and some 16 years after he went silent key himself) most of the timers are still on their original D cells...
as long as you don't care about accuracy (Score:1, Troll)
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Anyone with any brains can clearly see that scientific pursuit is the work of the Devil. Everything we could ever need to know is in the Bible, which is completely correct, so much so that we don't even have to verify it.
Science what the Devil uses to undermine our faith in the one true Lord by implanting false assumptions into the heads of scientists, which they then go on to 'prove' via their 'scientific method'. Renounce science and save your soul before it's too late!
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your as bad as the people you accuse.
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Making your own instrumentation is common. I've done it in an industry setting, though not in a lab; but I've heard about plenty of labs that build their own special-purpose instruments. The end result is that you have to calibrate it. Obviously you can't use something like this without at least verifying the calibration, but that can be very easy.
Once you've calibrated it, what's not to like about a piece of consumer electronics that does the job?
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Clearly you don't know how accurate the Wii Sensor is. Any difficulties you have problems with the Wii mote on the Wii are part of poor setups and user error.
The Wii Mote itself has an excellent sensor built into it, It's just that the sensor bar is terribly concieved. All it does is emit 2 Infrared signals at either end. Generally, this does just fine, but your TV is also emitting heat, the room is warm, etc etc. There are people who do it with 2 candles a foot from both sides of their television screen an
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There is accuracy.
Then there is reproducibility.
Those two are not the same.
The Wiimote measurements must be accurate for a proper gaming experience, but not necessarily reproducible.
This kind of measurements are nice if you wish to measure changes (change in water level), not if you wish to measure something absolute (the actual water level).
the joys of modern life (Score:1)
Doesn't surprise me. We use them to Teach. (Score:2)
I've been using them in my Computer Eng. Problem Solving class for 3 years.
Here's a vid where freshmen measure a drop (accounting for air resistance) using a wiimote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPCBfyQP4eE [youtube.com]
I'd say they make a great instrument as long as you quantify your error.
Heres a power idea (Score:1)
That's cool (Score:2)
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Accellerometer mode is useful for things like shaking, tilting, and swinging. Sadly, it has almost nil information for determining where in space something actually is -- only how it's moving, and to back-extrapolate position from motion data is highly inaccurate.
The way Wiimotes get highly sensitive positioning data for things like aiming and driving is by using the secomd mode, whihc i
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It's a gyro. Really cool tech actually, in that it's completely solid state (like the accelerometers)
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More specifically, a tuning fork gyroscope [wikipedia.org].
Apparently it is easy to read with i2c as a standalone part, too.
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Yep. That socket in the bottom of a Wiimote is nothing but a proprietary i2c interface connector. You can get accelerometer, button, and joystick input from a nunchuck with a $2.50 Atmel microcontroller. I don't know if they still have them, but sparkfun used to have a little adapter board to let you connect a Wiimote accessory to a .1" pitch 4 pin header.
Re:Power Glove (Score:4, Informative)
While a gyro is necessary to actually do full 6-DOF position tracking (otherwise you must assume that you're holding a specific orientation... this can still be good for something like an in-the-air mouse), the Wii system still wouldn't be good for detecting absolute motion without the sensor bar as well.
The problem is that while the sensors are fairly precise as far as measuring the accelerations (if they're anything like the iPhone sensors they're around 0.02g precise), when you try and integrate them twice to get the position, things start to fall apart. Imagine you do a simple up-and-down motion. You get a sinusoidal acceleration curve that when you integrate it once gives you an offset sinusoid to represent your velocity, and a second integration gives a third one to represent your position. However, at the end, your integration to the velocity level comes out to be not quite zero, because those small acceleration errors will mostly cancel out, but not perfectly. This is still a pretty good velocity estimate, since its close to zero. However, as far as your position is concerned, close to zero and actually zero are very different, so you get a constant, growing drift in your position from a small velocity error. The same things apply to gyros, although the math is a little more complex.
Basically if you want to use a sensor as a double integrator it has to be extraordinarily precise, and even then you're going to get some drift that you have to remove every once in a while, or have an absolute position value to keep it in check (kalman filters do a great job of interpreting data from multiple sensors). What the sensor bar and IR sensors do is give you an incomplete but useful reference on position and orientation that you can use to keep that drift in check. Adding the gyros definitely helps a lot too, but you still need the sensor bar to keep drift in check.
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So what all this mumbo jumbo means for your PowerWiiGlove is that you would have to use accellerometer mode, and that it would make your glove highly inaccurate for detecting sensitive motion (such as manipulating VR objects).
Or you could stick some LED's on the fingertips of the glove and point the wiimote at them. In fact, I could have sworn someone already did something like that.
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I remember hacking one of these as a kid when "Virtual Reality" first came out, and we did the same thing. Bucketloads of fun. Nintendo should probably review one of their previous commercial failures. At least they won't have any patenting issues.
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Like this one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerglove [wikipedia.org]
Did you miss the subject line of the post you are replying to?