can i connect pico to a wii nunchuck

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2016-01-01 by user61241

I was hoping to use the radio inside to help, but not sure if they are compatible. Could anyone help?

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2016-01-01 by DrAzzy

Have you read http://www.espruino.com/Wii

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-01-04 by @gfwilliams

Yes, the Pico should work fine - as @drazzy says, there's some information on getting it working at the link above - you just need to use the I2C pins for it (shown on the Pico's pinout diagram)

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2016-01-04 by JumJum

be careful with nunchuk. Cheaper ones may work on Wii, but you will have lots of problems with boards like Espruino or Arduino.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-01-04 by @gfwilliams

Really? Do you have a link to info on that? The only ones I've tried to date have been cheap ones :)

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2016-01-05 by luwar

I made a few experiments with two original and two 3rd party nunchucks. I had no problem with the 3rd party nunchucks in principle. The software module works with both. But the cheaper ones will die earlier. They do not have the same hardware protection as the original ones.
For instance when I put the connector in the wrong direction one clone was immediately dead. The original nunchuck pulls the voltage down, probably with a diode.
Maybe this is the reason for the negative reviews of the cheaper nunchucks?

Another point: Some older Arduino libraries use "encrypted" communication which is not supported by the cheap nunchucks. You can recognize this by the initialization sequence 0x40 0x00. The unencrypted communication starts with 0xF0 0x55.

• There is a little bug in the current espruino module. The second last sensor value will be returned by read() not the last one. That's why the first read always gives wrong data.
• The range of values from the joystick and the neutral point differ strongly between several nunchucks. I added a few calibration methods (zero, maxX, maxY) for normalization and the results look good.

After documenting I will make a pull request within the next few days to fix the two points.

But I have questions too:

• What is the correct English name? Nunchuck or Nunchuk
• The javascript file is wii_nunchuck.js. The documentation lies in Wii.md. Could I rename this file to wii_nunchuck.md?

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-01-06 by @gfwilliams

Nintendo actually seem to use Nunchuk, although people use both online. It might be best to stay with nunchuck for the module name, so we don't break everyone's code.

Sure, change the page to wii_nunchuck, but can you leave Wii in place, with an explanation and a link to the new page - other people will be linking to Wii and I don't want to break their links.

With the sensor values, do you need to wait for the response, or is it fast enough that just swapping the order of the write and read is enough? Changing the API is something I'd like to avoid, as again, it'll break people's existing code.

I'm not sure about calibration, it seems overly complex for the module - especially as it seems that a normal Nunchuk should be properly calibrated already - I bet the Wii doesn't do any calibration, so one that is uncalibrated would be almost unusable.

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2016-01-22 by user61241

thanks, really helpful