How to create your own commands and bind them in WPF – Edward Tanguay's piece on commands and WPF… I know that they are supposed to be awesome, but I haven't taken the time to sit down and figure them out yet.
Wii Data Visualization and Multipoint Nonsense by Matthias Shapiro (that’s me!)
I’ll post the full video on this blog and on the Veracity blog by Monday. Thank you for everyone who attended and voted… and go check out the other videos! There was alot of cool stuff besides physics and Wiimote hacking in those videos. (I’ll post a link when they post one on the MIX site.)
Now that we’ve successfully demoed the Wiimote visualizer in the Open Space at MIX 08 and shown off what we can do at the Show Off event, I need to be a responsible blogger and put the project up… files and all. I have, with Brian Peek’s permission, packaged his managed library in here as well. Please read and respect his licencing agreements.
There are really two parts to the WPF Wiimote Visualizer. The first part is the WPF Wiimote Binding Library, which we’ll cover in this post (or at least make this post the hub of that information). The second part is the Visualizer program itself, which is basically just the WPF Wiimote Library bound to a bunch of XAML elements.
The WPF Wiimote Binding Library will allow simple binding between your Wiimote and your WPF application (I’ve got a whole post on that here). But let me extrapolate a little on what the library has to offer. I’ve seperated out the data into different posts to make it a little more digestible.
OK, I’ve been waiting to post more on the Wii multipoint for a while, but I’m been waiting to get some kind of mobile infrared light system working. If you’ve watched Johnny Lee’s video, you would get the impression that it’s a 1-2-3 easy a cake thing to do.
You would be so wrong.
So, first I tried to duplicate his infrared array. He is using 100 IR LEDs to project a flood of IR light that is then reflected back to the Wiimote screen using reflective tape.
Reflective Tape: Is not easy to find. At all. Go ahead and try it. 3M sells reflective tape, but none of the hardware stores in Salt Lake City had any. As a plus, they said they could have it on hand within two weeks.
Ebay is an option if (again) you don’t mind waiting two weeks to get something. But there are many kinds of reflective tape. Which one works best? We’ll get to that part.
Infrared Array: Johnny Lee gives no specs on his IR array, so I can’t speak to its efficacy. I built one with 96 high output IR LED’s. In addition to the LED’s (which are $2 per LED at Radio Shack and closer to 30 cents per LED at Mouser), I had to get a breadboard, batteries, a voltimiter, and some resistors.
In the end, it didn’t work. The LEDs all lit up just fine, but they didn’t output anywhere near enough light to give a healthy reflection. Was this the light or the relfective tape I was using? We’ll get to that part.
Infrared Spotlight: I initially assumed it was the light. So I got my hands on a 1,000,000 candle power IR spotlight to solve that problem. Turned it on and… nothing. The Wiimote picked up the spotlight shining on my shirt, but it wouldn’t pick up the reflection off the tape. So is this a problem with the light or with the tape?
I have no idea, but I can tell you that the tape is borderline useless with everything I’ve tried.
Maybe I’m using low power IR LED’s (1.3 volt, 100mA) or maybe I’m using the wrong kind of reflective tape (I tried both engineering grade and retroreflective daybright… whatever that means), but I have had zero success replicating Johnny Lee’s design.
My next step is going to be an attempt to mount IR LED’s directly into a pair of gloves, which is how the Cynergy demo was done. This was the solutions that I finally got that working… as you’ll see in some videos over the next couple days.
OK, I hope no one is using my last post as an example of what you should be doing when interfacing the Wiimote with WPF. Because it was completely hack-tastic.
Instead, use my new WPF/Wii library. It uses the WPF INotifyPropertyChanged interface to act as an interface so that we can bind the Wiimote data directly to the XAML. More on that in a little bit, but first…
In this post, we’ll walk through creating a basic multi-point capable app that uses the Wiimote as an input device. What is really unique about this post is the fact that we’re going to do this in a way that requires absolutely no code whatsoever on your part.
That’s right. No code. At all. Zero knowledge of C# required.
Over the weekend, I pieced together a little application that will help us visualize the incoming Wiimote data in a way that would help understand the raw data points a little better as well as help out as we head toward our ultimate goal of multi-point WPF application development. This is what I came up with.
Disclaimer: The source code at this point is a mess. While the interface is all done in XAML and is very WPF, the code-behind is a hacked together mish-mash. I will at some point go back and restructure the code-behind to take advantage of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. When I do that, I’ll post on it and we’ll see another example of why WPF is so freaking cool.
OK, so I’ve taken note of multi-point WPF a couple times now (both times were in regards to Rick Barraza’s Cynergy demo) and I started noticing that people are really interested in this. So I decided to take some time to create a couple tutorials on creating multi-point interfaces in WPF.
A point of note: I am not a programmer. I am a designer. This means that whatever code I post will probably be a mess. But it also means that if I can make something work in WPF, anyone can.
The first question we need to address is how to pull multi-point interaction data into your system. You could, of course, buy one of these. I don’t have that kind of money, so I decided to try my hand at the poor man’s multi-point: the ever useful Wiimote controller for the Nintendo Wii.
In this post, we’ll go over how exactly to connect your Wii controller to your computer via Bluetooth. (I’m using Vista. Could be different for XP, but I haven’t tried.)
First, open up your Control Panel and double click on “Bluetooth Devices”
Last time I was at Microsoft, I spoke briefly (for about 2 hours) with Rick Barraza about the need to get designers into the WPF space and how des/devs (designer developers) can really push forward a technology like WPF. In fact, it was Rick who inspired me to do more work on this blog as a way of trying to help designers get more comfortable with WPF.
