WiiCan: Easy Wii remote control on Linux

Félix Ontañón, a very good friend and hacker from my company, has just released a new versión of a systray application which help to configure and manage the Wii remote control on Linux. The application is called WiiCan and is hosted on Launchpad.

The project has been programed in Python and it uses D-Bus to connect with hal (by now) and bluez for tracking the available bluetooth devices and wiimote connection status.

I’ll copy here from the project’s site the features:

Discover if it’s an available bluetooth device for connect wiimote
Display a list of available keyboard-mouse-wiimote mappings
User-defined mappings creation assistant
Mappings manager:

  • New/Edit/Delete
  • Up/Down order
  • Visible/Invisible

Notify the state of wiimote usaging:

  • Bluetooth available/unavailable
  • Discovering wiimote
  • Wiimote disconnected

And here some screenshots:

WiiCan systray
Connected with a Wiimote
Connected with a Wiimote
Mapping options
Mapping options

I haven’t tryied the application because I haven’t got any wiimote, but some friends have already tested and they’ve told me that it work great, and they are very happy with the tool. So I’d like to invite you to test it and share here your experience.

And also I’d like to invite you to colaborate with the project, reporting bugs, patches and translations.

I hope you enjoy it 😉

18 thoughts on “WiiCan: Easy Wii remote control on Linux”

  1. Sorry to ask here, but as your friends blog is in spanish or sth, I will try this and maybe you can forward it, or hint him here.

    I have installed the tool and brought a WiiMote to the computer.

    Bluetooth on, and WiiMote is searching for the Wii/receiver.

    But they don’t connect. Is there anything I have to do? There is no pairing mode, or do I have to pair via Bluez?

    Tried manual pairing too, but I don’t know the WiiMote’s code, and 0000 and 1234 etc. didn’t do it.

    1. Hi Mike, I’m the developer of Wiican. Sorry for my spanish blog, you’re right i need to publish those things vía some kind of english devlog.

      About the error maybe this can help:

      Do you clicked via mouse left button menu?
      Can you start wiican in a shell for prompting errors?

      If you think this is a real bug please, report it on https://bugs.launchpad.net/wiican/trunk

      Really really thank you for use my software Mike.

      1. well, when left clicking the tray-icon, there is only a greyed-out “disconnect” and the mouse/neverball configuration sets.

        Don’t I have to connect the WiiMote via the BluezApplet before using it at all?

        But there it fails, because of the PINs.

        (On Ubuntu Karmic, so it should be all fine, it’s just my first time with WiiMote + PC :))

      2. answering myself: I have to click the type (i.e. Mouse) first, and then it connects.

        Didn’t know that.

        Works now, thanks a lot, will try out neverball :))
        Thanks soo much!!

  2. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have this as a gnome-bluetooth plugin instead of a separate app?

  3. Committed Turkish translation as possible as i could (just one left; as you guess that huge licence aggreement). Wiis are in my special interest, as you know my internship project in Emergya, Tuzbolin, was Wii based as well 🙂 Congratulations for the app. Holas @ todos Emergians de Turquia …

  4. Thanks for a great app! I am using it with Ubuntu 9.10 NBR and XBMC. I’m not familiar with the mapping. I have noticed when I have the mouse option enabled only the wiimote does not track very well, meaning it is not very sensitive and I can’t click on an icon. Any help you can provide on getting the mouse pointer to track better and how to change the config to allow for example the “A” button of the wiimote to be the left click of a mouse. I would be completely set if I can get these two items resolved. Again, thanks for a great app.

Comments are closed.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.