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)