 Hello! Let me go back in time. Five years. I'm at a thrift shop with my wife, looking for stuff for my daughter, who was one at the time. I see this horse, made by Fisher Bryce. It bounces, but it's also digital. It comes with a little unit that you hook to your TV and your kid can ride this and play simple little games up on the TV. I'm looking at it. It is priced, it was $6 or $7, which I thought was a good deal. I didn't know if it worked or not. I thought, you know what, if it doesn't work, she can still ride it. And maybe I can put electronics in it to make it to work, to get it to work. Well, while I was there, I looked it up online on Amazon. These things were like 120 to 150 bucks new. I was like, of course I'm gonna buy it for $7. So I get home, and it did work. And the games came with, were decent for, you know, one year old. It had different levels, so you can make it more difficult. But basically, it was just, you know, they bounce around it. Again, it moves like this and it's got two buttons on the back here, and it's got the spin thing. Different things would happen. You know, on the games, you go to a zoo and you bounce now, so come out and spin this, and the monkey comes out, you know, and they can select these buttons to choose a different game. And all that was controlled through infrared LED lights right here, which sent out a digital signal, which I did once quickly look at with an Arduino and an infrared receiver, and it sent out a barrage of information. It would take me a while to fit through all that. But theoretically, I could program this, or I could program an Arduino to receive those signals, send them to a computer, and control the game. But I went one step simpler. So this was five years ago, and it has been sitting on my porch most of the time since then, collecting dust. My wife has asked me to get rid of it, and I said, well, you know, I've been pulling on to it to make a video, because, you know, I'm so quick at doing those things. So again, the video done now, so that we can get rid of this now. But go back another five years from that five years, go back 10 years to 2009. I just started doing Linux videos on YouTube. And some of my earliest videos were on this device. These are amazing pieces of hardware. We control. This is a real weak controller. I also have some third party ones. You know, they're 10 to 20 bucks when you buy them, at least last I checked when I bought mine. I don't own a Wii, but I own a couple of these. These things are amazing for their price. They have microphones, they have speakers, they have LEDs, they have multiple buttons, they have accelerometers, they connect through Bluetooth, and the front here is an infrared camera that can detect the movement of infrared light. This horse sends out infrared signals. And yes, like I said, sending out signals, digital signals based on where the buttons are pressed, where the horse is moving. But I didn't care about that. I wanted something very, very simple. So what I did was I designed a very simple platform gamer, if you can even call it that. We're just a character, runs across the screen and collects stars. And how do you make the character run across the screen? Well, you move the mouse. You fast you wiggle the mouse, but faster the character would move. So all I had to do was install the packages using my package manager to connect to the Wii controller through Bluetooth and tell it to look for infrared light and use that to move the mouse. It doesn't matter where the mouse is moving. They would just detect mouse movement, hook the computer to the TV, set this on the counter in front of my daughter, and as she rolled the horse, the character moved across the screen and collected stars. It was good. She had fun for about five minutes. But the thing is that the games it came with, she was amused for about five minutes as well. Kids just don't have attention spans. But the point of this video is telling you that if you're interested in getting into hardware, definitely there's a lot you can do. But the simpler you keep your projects at first, the less discourage you'll get. This was so simple to do. And you may already have one of these lying around. And you know what? If this didn't work and it didn't have the infrared lights up here working, this also can control the mouse through movement with the accelerometers. So theoretically, I could just take this here and the movement of the horse making the control move could have moved the character across the screen. So if you have any type of rocking horse or riding horse, you can hook one of these to that and have it control the mouse cursor moving the character across screen. Again, very, very simple. But it's a starting point. And move on from there again. I could detect the signals from here infrared signals and read the raw data on whether the buttons are being pressed. This is being spun this way or that or whether it's moving up and down. And I can correlate those to keys in a game. And like I said, theoretically, I mean, I got two buttons here and I think it does different signals ready to go this way or that way that that's at least four buttons and then movement. I don't know if I can do that if that's enough to play do maybe a little bit. I guess I can go left and right and shoot. I don't know. And then this can move forward. I have to look into that. Anyway, this video was put up my films by Chris. I'm Chris. That's Chris Decay. There's a link in the description films like Chris.com. And I just thank you for watching again. This is wasn't a very technical video, but I just wanted to just throw ideas out there. If you're looking into getting stuff, don't over complicated at first. Don't discourage yourself. You can do very simple things. If you don't have a Wii controller, it is a fun thing to play with. Even if you don't have a week because you can program it to be any keys on the keyboard or game controllers. You can program for any game on your computer. You can install a couple packages on Linux and you're ready to go. Anyway, I do thank you for watching. As always, visit filmsbycris.com. That's Chris Decay. There's a link in the description. And I hope that you have a great day.