DIY Wii Sensor Bar LEDs

Interesting! Some people have way too much time on their hands. (Just kidding.)

-Dan

Actually, I meant the fact you did such a thorough job documenting it! I'm a software developer, and documentation is always the *last* thing I want to do.

Note, however, that I fully understand spending way too much time tweaking something until you get it just right. After all, we want it the way we want it. We wouldn't be on this forum if that weren't the case, right?

-Dan

Your measurements seem like they might make a good start at determining how to build a sensor bar that works for trying to make a closer to 1:1 movement ratio for using the Wii as a pointer based on screen size and how far from it you are.

That's really my only remaining gripe about how the thing works. faux-lightgun games will never work on large format screens until that issue is resolved, and it'd even be nice for FPS's and shooters on rails in my opinion.

Anybody know what type of IR LED works best?
Im finding:
Standard Beam
Medium Beam
Narrow-Angle_Beam
Wide-Angle-Beam
example ledtronics com/ds/SML10IR941T/
not enough posts for a real url

I'm going to make one specifically for traveling with the Wii (which I do often).

Battery powered + not having to remove my current one = happiness.

Medium beam should be fine.

Here is mine. It's half the width of the standard bar to accommodate my tight playing space. I threw it together from some scrap wood without too much thought put into it, the components are just generic IR LEDs from radioshack, all eight wired in series, and a 9 volt wallwart power supply driving that. I ended up sanding the lenses of the LEDs to obtain a slightly wider dispersion pattern.

I would love to have a new bar for my TV (Sony GrandWega 50 LCD Proj) but I have no experience with soldering so I'm at a bit of a loss. I was wondering if making a new bar the width of the screen would improve the accuracy or not.

To test could I just set up something simple? I heard Candles work... any truth to that. I would like to know it makes a difference before I invest time and money into a new bar.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

The optimum working distance of the wiimote from the sensorbar is directly proportional to the distance between the IR emitter clusters. The regular sensor bar is 8 inches between clusters, and has a minimum working distance of 36 inches. If you get closer than that, the pointer just disappears. So the minimum distance in inches is D=W/0.222, where W is the width of your sensorbar in inches. The optimum distance though from the regular sensorbar is about 66 inches, which works out to a formula of D=W/0.121, and the maximum distance as per the instruction manual is 96 inches, which makes the formula D=W/0.083

So..
Min distance=W/0.222
Optimum distance=W/0.121
Max distance=W/0.083

If you apply that to the width of your TV, I think you'll find that you'd have to stand quite a ways farther from the set than you'd like if you put the IR emitter clusters on either side of the set. For my 26 inch HDTV for example, I'd have to stand a minimum of 10 feet back! For yours, that'd be almost 20 feet.

Oh and candles should work the same as IR LEDs, though I haven't actually tried that, so I don't know how well it works. Seems kind of silly really

Thank you for the explanation. At this point I don't think that I need to do anything different as we use the current bar at it's optimum range.

Cleared that up

Cheers!