NAME

       XWiimote - Nintendo Wii Remote Linux Device Driver

DESCRIPTION

       The  XWiimote  driver  and  utilities  can  be used to connect a Nintendo Wii Remote to your computer. It
       consists of a linux kernel driver, a BlueZ Bluetooth plugin and user-space utilities.  They  replace  the
       old user-space drivers like cwiid or wiiuse.

       Since  bluez-4.96 the wiimote plugin is available upstream and you should be able to pair your Wii Remote
       like any other Bluetooth device. If pairing fails, simply connect the Wii Remote without pairing/bonding.
       The  linux kernel driver for the Wii Remote is available since linux-3.1 and full support for Wii Remotes
       since linux-3.3. It  is  called  hid-wiimote  and  requires  the  HID  core  drivers  to  be  loaded.  No
       configuration is needed for the driver and plugin.

       The  user-space  utilities provide a library that can be used to monitor and access connected Wii Remotes
       and they provide several applications to manage connected Wii Remotes.

   Connecting Wii Remotes
       To connect a Wii Remote to your host be sure that the official linux Bluetooth stack (BlueZ) is installed
       on  your  system  and  your kernel has the hid-wiimote kernel plugin loaded. Then connect your Wii Remote
       like any other Bluetooth device. The system  log  (dmesg)  should  print  some  messages  about  the  new
       connected device.

       The Wii Remote can be put into discoverable mode by pressing the red sync-button behind the battery cover
       on the back. The Wii Remote will stay in discoverable mode for 20s. You can also hold the 1+2 buttons  to
       put  the  Wii  Remote into discoverable state. However, the first method works more reliably!  If you are
       asked for PIN input while bonding the devices, then your BlueZ bluetoothd daemon  does  not  include  the
       wiimote plugin. See Bugs below for more information. If this does not help, you can still connect to your
       Wii Remote without pairing/bonding (i.e. not using authentication with a PIN).  This should work with any
       BlueZ version.

   User-Space Tools
       If  you  have  a  Wii  Remote  connected  to  your host you can test it with the xwiishow(1) application.
       However, if you do not have the xwiimote user-space tools installed, you can find Wii Remotes with
           ls /sys/module/hid_wiimote/drivers/hid:wiimote/
       They   are   listed   there   with   their   device   ID   inside    that    directory.    For    example
       /sys/module/hid_wiimote/drivers/hid:wiimote/0005:057E:0306.0001
       You can retrieve kernel information about the device by reading the files in this directory.

   BlueZ wiimote plugin
       Since  bluez-4.96  the  bluetooth  daemon includes a special wiimote plugin which handles wiimote pairing
       requests. If you pair a Wii Remote, the plugin will automatically generate the right  PIN  and  pair  the
       device.  If  you  are asked for PIN input, you either do not have this plugin installed or your device is
       not detected. See BUGS for troubleshooting Wii Remote connection problems.

   Wii Remote kernel driver
       The wiimote kernel driver is available since linux-3.1 in the official linux kernel. Since linux-3.2  the
       accelerometer  and  IR sensor are supported. Since linux-3.3 extension support is available.  There is no
       need to configure this driver. All configuration should be done in the user-space utilities.  The  kernel
       driver provides a simple abstraction layer which does not need any configuration.

       With  linux-3.11  the  driver  was  rewritten to support extension hotplugging, device detection and more
       advanced functionality. It is highly recommended to use a kernel version greater than, or equal to 3.11.

   libxwiimote
       The kernel API for the Wii Remote is quite complex. It is documented in the xwiimote source repository in
       doc/INTERFACE
       To  help  application developers to use special Wii Remote functionality, we developed the libxwiimote(7)
       library which provides an easy API to manage connected Wii Remotes.

       If an application wants to use the IR or accelerometer sensors of a Wii Remote or if it requires advanced
       key-maps, it should use libxwiimote to access connected Wii Remotes.

BUGS

   Connecting the Wii Remote requires PIN input
       If  you  are  asked  for PIN input while connecting your Wii Remote then you either do not have the BlueZ
       wiimote plugin installed or your device is not detected as a Wii Remote. This might happen with 3rd party
       Wii  Remotes  which  are not sold by Nintendo. You can still use these devices by connecting them without
       pairing or bonding. Tools like gnome-bluetooth require you to select "Use  no  PIN"  to  connect  devices
       without pairing/bonding.

       There  are attempts to improve the detection of Wii Remotes in BlueZ. If you are sure that your device is
       not detected properly, please report a bug upstream.

   The X-Server reacts weirdly on Wii Remote input
       By default the X-Server opens all input devices that are available on your machine. The Wii Remote  input
       devices  are  very useless without a proper keymap so you should instruct your X-Server to ignore raw Wii
       Remotes input devices.  The xwiimote source repository contains an xorg-config file  res/50-xorg-disable-
       wiimote.conf  which  can  be  installed  into  /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/  to  ignore all raw Wii Remote input
       devices.
       This only ignores raw Wii Remote devices. If you used some of  the  user-space  utilities  to  remap  the
       buttons then the new devices will still be detected by your X-Server.

AUTHOR

       David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@googlemail.com>
       The XWiimote Project: http://dvdhrm.github.io/xwiimote

SEE ALSO

       libxwiimote(7), xwiishow(1)