The Wii remote (or wiimote) and robots

www.viroadshow....
This was one of the coolest applications I have seen in a long time. One of the Applications Engineers here at National Instruments took a Wii controller (or wiimote) and used it to drive a robotic arm. He used VIs (or virtual instruments) to create a program that takes the accelerometer data from the Wiimote and changes it into motion commands for the robot.
One of the coolest things about this, though, was that it only took him a few hours to do. Pretty impressive.

[@wilkinsonquints]

So, one of the questions I have heard on this video is, "What hardware was used?" Evan used an old nuDrive (because I think that was what he had on hand)which is a four axis drive for stepper motors. The motion controller was a PCI-7354 which has four axes of stepper or servo motor control. Beyond that, there really is just the big robotic arm and a bunch of cables.