<div dir="ltr"><div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a title="photo sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/2918695790/"><img style="border: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0);" alt="" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3001/2918695790_b17eb78fae_m.jpg"></a> <br>
<span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/2918695790/">WiiMote experiment at school</a> by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/plakboek/">plakboek</a> </span></div>
Our school is installing a <a href="http://www.twotouch.com/">2Touch</a>
Interactive WhiteBoard (IWB) system (locally made) that use a short
throw, wide screen projector, optical sensors and suprisingly, no software
drivers. Last year I saw this cool <a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html">TED video about building your own dirt-cheap IWB</a>. This got me curious ..<br><br>The idea of linking a WiiMote with a digital projector this way is credit to the inspiring work by <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ejohnny/projects/wii/">Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University</a>.
Thank you goes to Graham Cahill who encouraged me to give this a
workout in my classroom, even organising his son to build some IR pens
for us to try.<br><br>Today we managed to build our own WiiMote IWB for
only $40 of trouble. We managed to product some interesting
drawings on a whiteboard displaying an image from a digital projector
using a home-made infrared pen. My students and I then had some fun
drawing with the open source software TuxPaint on our whiteboard and
this <a href="http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard">free wiimote software</a> on my Apple MacBook.<br> <br>You can view the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/plakboek/tags/wiimote/show/">full slideshow of drawings</a>
that we easily made. In
all, it was a nice activity to explain the different technologies used
to communicate and network between all the different devices in this
setup; BlueTooth, Wireless and Infrared. I know that we are not the first to try this. It also now seem to make a lot of sense for us to
have considered an optical based system with open software instead of a
pressure sensitive one using proprietary software and all the nonsense
of vendor lockin.<br>
<br>Not a bad way folks, for us to celebrate <a href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/">Software Freedom Day 2008</a> with some important lessons learned along the way. :-)<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College<br>
<a href="http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au">http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au</a><br><br>"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead<br>
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