Create Onscreen Graffiti with This Pi/Wiimote Rig

While defacing objects with spray paint might be fun, it’s also destructive and can land you in quite a bit of trouble. If, however, you’d…

Jeremy Cook
5 years agoArt

While defacing objects with spray paint might be fun, it’s also destructive and can land you in quite a bit of trouble. If, however, you’d like to practice this type of art without the expense of actual spray paint, fines, or bail, this Raspberry Pi-powered Wiimote setup by David Pride will let you do so virtually.

As it’s been many years since the Nintendo Wii made its debut, these handheld sensors can be had cheaply, and how to extract data from them isn’t new territory. Unfortunately, Pride’s preferred Wiimote library for the Raspberry Pi, “Cwiid” is no longer actively supported, so he did have to do some work to extract the x/y screen positions. Once that was figured out, he wrote a Pygame script to mimic the Wiimote’s cursor, and from there it wasn’t too hard to turn it into a digital graffiti rig.

Along with the actual programming work, he also designed a mirror fixture that sits on top of the Wiimote to allow one to use it vertically like an actual spray can. This, of course, meant that he had to invert the x coordinates, which is accounted for in the project’s code found on GitHub.

The setup is hard-coded to run at 1920 x 1080 resolution, and things reportedly got pretty hot after testing on a Pi 3. Pride thus recommends using a 3B+ if you have the hardware available. Be sure to check out the short demo below. It looks like a lot of fun as-is, but you could certainly put your own unique spin on things with new brushes and other functionality.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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