Wiimote accelerometer experiments | Navigation | Forum

So, I got a USB Bluetooth dongle for Christmas, which means I can now talk to my Wiimotes, including asking for their accelerometer readings.  I plan to use this to practice writing some basic Kalman filters so I can talk about navigation for CLLARE with a little more confidence/experience.  The MEMS accelerometer in the Wiimote is not that accurate compared to others out there, but it will be good for cutting my teeth on since the Bluetooth interface takes care of actually getting the values into a program variable – if I bought a more accurate chip I wouldn't have a clue how to get the readings out of it, I need to read up on EE more.

Ultimately I hope to use a Wiimote and my eeePC to make a small and portable IMU, stick it in my car and go for a drive careful drive somewhere remote (so I can hold my speed steady for 30 seconds, then smoothly increase it by 10 km/h and hold that steady, etc., so that the graph of speed readings should look like a staircase – this will make it easy to judge accuracy).  I'll keep the forums updated.

This will be largely unecessary should somebody with real navigation engineering experience turn up and commit to the team but I don't mind starting out with the risk of that happening because (i) it will be fun and (ii) I'll be able to reinvest the knowledge and software in another project easily enough.