WiiWill

A simple Wii remote gamepad mapper for Linux.

Installation and usage

1. Download the tarball from the Releases section
2. Untar with tar -xvf WiiWill.tar.xz
3. Install make and run sudo make install
4. Launch program
5. Connect Wii remote from system's bluetooth settings

Steps 4 and 5 must be done in order for WiiWill to recognize the remote. Multiple instances of the app can be launched (generally done by middle-clicking the app icon in the taskbar/dash) to handle multiple Wiimotes.

Disconnect Wiimote through system bluetooth settings. Uninstall with sudo make uninstall.

Motivations

Other similar programs seem to be either unmaintained or difficult to use. My hope with this is to be able to distribute a single package or binary that works out-of-the-box, with no separate driver or library installation necessary.

How it works

Disclaimer

I'm learning about how Linux handles input devices on the fly. There may well be better ways to achieve what I'm doing here; I'm just going by what worked for me. That said, suggestions and contributions are welcome.

1. Monitors udev for uevents in which files under /dev/input (specified by DEVNAME) are created
2. Finds DEVPATH for uevent where NAME is specified as "Nintendo Wii Remote"
3. Combs through contents of /sys/$DEVPATH for a folder called eventX
4. Reads events from /dev/input/eventX
5. Generates mapped event through uinput

Acknowledgements

• nervo/wiican for the inspiration
• Oblomov/wiimote-pad and xwiimote as references