Recently I watched this YouTube Video and was very impressed about what I saw. As I often make presentations and training, I thought to me this would be a really catchy solution for my next presentation. A low-cost solution for a touch Whiteboard simply by utilizing the Nintendo WII Controller :-) That's it!
I investigated my old hardware box, found an old remote, captured the infrared LED from the old remote, soldered the infrared LED to a battery and a switch, assembled it into an old marker.
That's it - I built my own electronic touch whiteboard pen:
That was the fun part. Now I wanted to test it with my Windows Vista Laptop (DELL Precision M65). I fetched my WII Controller, started the Bluetooth detection and - after some tries - I got it into my Vista as a Human Interface Device (HID). Some strange thing happened: When I wanted to connect the WII remote again, I had to remove it from the Bluetooth device list. Only then was it recognized as a "connected" device. So - if you have problems connecting the WII remote to you PC, try removing it completely from the Bluetooth device list first!
Now came the relly exciting part! I downloaded the Wiimote Whiteboard from here and ran the tool. The calibration of my monitor with my newly assembled "electronic touch whiteboard pen" was no problem at all - it simply worked as expected. Mark the top/left edge, top/right edge, bottom/left edge and the bottom/right edge - fine...
But then - nothing... no Mouse cursor movement... ...no clicks... ...nada... did I do something wrong? Was the "Wiimote Whiteboard" program not compatible to Vista? I instantly tried it on my old Windows XP Desktop (EPOX BT-DG02 USB-Bluetooth Dongle) - and it worked!!!
The next day I could not stop thinking about it - as I do not want to install Windows XP on my Laptop for my presentations. Luckily the Author of "Wiimote Whiteboard" provided the Source Code and more luckily - it was written in .NET!!!
So I could load it into my Visual Studio (I converted it to a VS2008 Project) and tried to find out where the problem with Vista could be. The C# code seemed really simple to me - the mouse cursor was positioned by using "SendInput" of the Wine32 API via P/Invoke. Hmm - this is not working under Vista? And yes - after googleing around - it seemed the most likely issue. In the MSDN API Documentation of SendInput there is a talk about "UIPI" - the User Interface Privilege Isolation. What's that? Never heard about it... Besides - here is a PDF with deep technical information about Vista UIPI that I found while looking for the problem. And it's really a fact - Vista prevents certain Windows Messages, depending on the so called "Integrity Level" of the program.
You can use Process Explorer to watch the current "Integrity Level" of a process:
As you can see, the "WiimoteWhiteboard v0.2.exe" process is at Integrity Level "High". Maybe "Hight" is not high enough? There is only one higher Level called "System". So I tried to change the assembly manifest to claim for "System" Integrity Level . But as I did not succeed in about 5 minutes, I tried another thing first. Often there are compatibility issues with 64-Bit Windows Versions with .NET Programs as they can run on x86 and x64 in native mode by default. So I forced the program to compile in x86 mode. And that was the fast solution :-) - Wiimote Whiteboard now runs on Windows Vista X64 without a problem. There are other versions in the Wiimote Whiteboard Forum on the Homepage, but I never got other versions to work correctly on my Vista X64.
Subscribe