[pygame] Adding Wii Remote support to pygame

[robomancer <robomancer@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've been playing around with the Wii Remote (wiimote) under Linux.  The Wii Remote is a Bluetooth device and some people (not me) at wiili.org have figured out some of the specifics of how to talk to the thing.  Their sample code lets you use the Wii Remote as a pointer, map the buttons to keyboard buttons via xlib, and so on.

Their sample code is also written in Python, which means it was trivial to code up a simple Wii Pong game in Pygame (which I did this afternoon :))

However, the sample code is a bit... hackish, and doesn't really work well within the Pygame paradigm.  So I'm thinking of working on adding proper Wii Remote support to pygame, as another type of input device, similar to 
pygame.mouse and pygame.joystick.  For now I am simply writing my own Python module, but I'm trying to make the interface match the usual Pygame device interface so that, once it's stable, it can hopefully be dropped in to Pygame directly (sometime after 
1.8). 

Here's the most interesting stuff that the Wii Remote reports:

1) Accelerations in x, y, and z (at around 100 Hz)

2) Status of all 11 buttons (4 for the D-Pad, A, B, 1, 2, +, -, and Home)

3) "Dots" sensed by the IR sensor (there is a sensor bar with two IR emitters placed a known distance apart)

So it can't really be handled as an ordinary keyboard/mouse/joystick device; it's more like a 3-axis mouse (the accelerometer readings) combined with a joystick (the buttons) and another 2-axis mouse (the screen position pointed to, determined by looking at the sensor-bar dots).

It also needs its own module just because we talk to it completely differently than a normal keyboard/joystick... we have to have a bluetooth socket around to send and receive control/data packets, for example.

So here is my rough proposal:

* New pygame.wiimote module.  The init() function isn't called by normal pygame.init(), because pygame.wiimote depends on the Python bluetooth module, which is not standard.  So you have to init() wiimote manually to get Wiimote support.  (The bluetooth module won't be loaded until init() is called, so Pygame as a whole will not depend on the bluetooth module, unless a game specifically requests wiimote support).

* Similar interface as joystick for setting up the Wiimotes, with wiimote.get_count() (which will have to discover them via bluetooth) and a constructor, pygame.wiimote.Wiimote(id), that initializes a single Wiimote.

* get_* methods in the Wiimote object for polling

* New event types in pygame.event for event-based operation

* Actually generating these events on the event queue when needed

I welcome any comments or suggestions :)

At the moment I am concentrating my efforts on the Linux platform, but expect to make a cross-platform compatability layer for Windows (and maybe Mac) once the initial effort is off the ground.

Thanks,
robomancer