So I did the most bootleg experiment ever...

afterburn showed us this video about tracking fingers with the Wii remote, and I learned from it that the Wii Remote has an infrared receiver in it.

Since I don't have any IR emitters and receivers to work with yet, I got this idea to play around with the Wii Remote and the sensor bar. I remembered that the Wii had a sensitivity setting screen where it showed a live feedback of IR dots. I know there's probably apps (in fact I think there's the link on that video page) that do the same thing but I was too lazy to look and set it up. The crummy Wii remote setting page will have to do.

I wanted to see how well these IR signals from the sensor bar reflected off of objects (compared to the retroreflectors). I started by laying the Wiimote on its side on my desk with the sensor bar next to it. That didn't work very well because I had to hold whatever I wanted the IR to reflect off of up at the exact angle and every time I moved it farther, the object would misalign with the beam. So I ended up just leaving the Wii remotes up right (on their flat bases) because it was easier to not misalign to the sensor when I was moving objects higher and lower vs forward and backward. Then I got the idea of taping the retro reflector up to the ceiling so it remained aligned at the exact spot but the tape wasn't strong enough and the thing just fell off. =/

So then I remembered I had some command hooks. From there I just started having one idea after another and this is where the real ghettoness came in. I looked in my room for objects I could use as reflectors that I could put up in the ceiling with command hooks, and I saw, over on my shelf, my collection of TY beanie babies. I thought, OMG PEFECT! I had wondered if clothing color is an issue with IR and since my beanie babies are fabric and colorful, I could use them as clothed test dummies per se.

So I picked out my lab rats, Luke the black lab and Cheezer the white mouse (irony, lol), and what I did was I tied a piece of yarn (since I had bags of that lying around from crocheting) to my TY beanies and looped it through the command hook on the ceiling, which made a ghetto pulley system. I then taped down a button on my TV remote and jammed it in the space between the two Wiimotes sitting on my charging station. The two Wiimotes kept the TV remote upright. Then I lighted the sensor and the beam up to the hanging beanie and proceeded to lower the beanie towards the wii motes. THis whole time I was watching out for dots on my TV.

So results? Okay my testing equipment and set up was no doubt ghetto but I found that my white mouse scattered the IR better than my black dog because I saw more dots on the TV screen after the IR had reflected off of Cheezer. Cheezer was also able to reflect IR a little better than Luke (with 1 cm more distance). I kinda eyed the distances and they were so close so maybe I imagined a difference. However, the number of dots was certainly an interesting find. I'm not sure how powerful the IR beam that is coming out of my remote is or if the IR emitters we're going to use has the same luminosity, so I'm not sure if they'll act the same way (as in picked up by the sensors as multiple dots instead of one). However if they do, it might be possible to track abnormal reflections or perhaps track change in the number of dots. Of course, the dots are more of a graphical display and an actual device would display voltage differences. So the ultimate question is, does the dots relate to a measurable difference in terms of voltage or resistance, etc?

Anyway this was just all just me messing around. I can't wait to actually get a bread board and set up a circuit and test this with proper equipment. Maybe I can still use my ceiling pulley system and my beanie babies for that as it seems like a good idea to test colors and keep objects constantly aligned.