Ever since I found out about the Wii, I wanted one. However, what interested me more than playing the games was making them. Lucky for me, the Wiimote is a fully capable Bluetooth HID device, which the folks at WiiLi have been able to pretty effectively figure out. I was able to actually find a Wiimote (at MSRP!) and proceeded to hack away.

Jedi Trainer is an extremely cliche lightsaber combat game that uses the Wiimote. It runs in Linux, and requires Python, pygame, bluez, and pybluez. After you’ve got those, download the .tar.gz, extract it (try tar -zxvf jedi-trainer-0.1.tar.gz), cd into the directory, and run main.py (python main.py). It will ask you to sync the Wiimote, which takes a moment, and will then launch. You may have to edit the Wiimote MAC address if it’s hardcoded into the program (I believe it is).

Although it’s not really a fully complete game, as I just threw it together over the past two days from the ground up, It’s got a few neat features I’d like to point out. I tried to capture the sort of ambient lightsaber feel, to make it a bit more special than holding a piece of shiny white plastic. You have to first turn it on, by pushing the “up” button, which makes it “spring” to life and turns on ambient lightsaber noises. Whenever you swing it, independent of if you’re doing an action, it’ll make that snazzy lightsaber “swoosh” noise. All the controls use only the accelerometer features of the Wiimote, as I don’t have a sensor bar, which should be good news for anyone like me who only has the Wiimote. It’s all pretty fun – I hope to get a video up of me playing in a day or two.

Provided below are helpful visual instructions to make your life easier. Be sure to hold the Wiimote so it is facing you for defense and facing up for attack.

Download Jedi Trainer 0.1