Wii remote and Sensor bar Help.

josephchrzempiec

Hello my brother gave me a pair of wii remotes he had extra and I been searching around online how to set them up with my raspberry pi Zero sense that is the board i only have at the moment. From what I'm reading the Wii remotes are blue tooth correct? Now i was wondering What is the Wii sensor bar for? Some people say that it works with the Wii remotes. But i looked up a tear down video and only haves some kind of what looks like a IR receiver in it. So can someone help me out on what would i need to set up my Wii controllers i have a blue tooth dongle if that is what is needed for the controllers to work. Also i was wondering Can 2 wii remotes be setup to play two player games from the N64 or NES games?

mrbwa1

@josephchrzempiec WiiMotes have been notoriously difficult to set up in Retropie. IIRC, they only use the buttons and D-pad, not the motion controls.

The Sensor bar is just a couple or IR LEDs. The WiiMotes have an IR sensitive camera in them that uses the sensor bar IR LEDs as a fixed reference to calculate their position and orientation. You can certainly output the accelerometer/gyroscope values from a WiiMote, but I can't remember if the processing is all in tyhe WiiMote, or requires specific game code.

Also, the light bar basically just needs to be powered. I have seem people used a couple IR LEDs when trying to adapt a WiiMote to a PC.

Anyhow, check here for more info on using the WiiMote with retropie: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Wiimotes-with-classic-controllers

josephchrzempiec

@mrbwa1 Hello thank you very much for clearing that up. I honestly don't think the light bar is needed if Only playing classes games like the N64 or the NES games. But it is good to know what it does. So i thank you for explaining that to me. I'm actually got to set it up tonight. I just took a look at the site and skim through it and it said i would be able to setup two Wiimotes. But does that mean i would need two blue tooth dongles or would the single one i have work for both?

mrbwa1

@josephchrzempiec I haven't tried to set them up in a while. I eventually gave up because I couldn't get the classic controller add on working right and my old Playstation Dual Analog controls on a dual PSX -> USB Adapter worked straight away.

That said:

You can hook up multiple remotes with one bluetooth dongle. I only ever got 2 working because 2 of my 4 WiiMotes are aftermarket units and weren't recognized correctly (another issue I had).

-My other issue with bluetooth was getting everything to auto-bind since I wanted to still use the wiimotes with the Wii as well. If I recall, it was a matter of re-binding them to the wii to use them with the Wii once the Retropie setup was turned off (I had it set up to auto bind at startup with Retroipe).

-The basic WiiMote should work great as a NES controller. If the Classic Controller add on is now working, it should be good for most stuff.

josephchrzempiec

@mrbwa1 Hello thank you for that. I have 2 original wii remotes. My wii system is the first generation and it die on me. So I thought I could reuse the remotes on it.