Permanently pair Wiimote on Windows!

Great news! After many days of investigating Toshiba’s Bluetooth stack, and possibly injuring my feet while doing it (long story), I can now permanently pair* Wiimotes on Windows, using the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack! That means, from then on, the Wii Remote will instantly and automatically connect to Windows whenever you press any button on the Wii Remote (except the SYNC button), even after restarting the computer or changing the Wii Remote batteries! Just like it does on the Wii (except that the lights keep flashing instead of changing to show the Wiimote number). And it will PROBABLY even work on the new Wii Remote Plus TR remotes! You can even connect your Wiimote to your Wii like normal, and then after you disconnect it from the Wii it will go back to connecting to your computer automatically.

The only downsides are that Windows itself won’t automatically disconnect and switch the Wii Remote off when you don’t use it for a time period. So if you just bump your Wii Remote walking past without noticing, and your computer is still on, your Wiimote batteries will go flat. And we don’t know how to fully UNDO this. We can probably undo it on the computer end, but the Wiimote will always try to contact your computer whenever you press a button (at least until you connect your Wiimote to 3 different Wiis). And of course you need the Toshiba Bluetooth stack, because it won’t work on the others.

On the other hand, GlovePIE will now be able to confidently switch your Wiimote completely off while you are not running a script, or maybe even while you ARE running a script but haven’t pressed anything for a time, saving your battery life. That’s instead of just switching off the sound, rumble, leds, IR camera, continuous reporting, and accelerometer and nunchuk reporting like it does now when you stop a script.

But the BEST part is… I didn’t sign any NDA with Toshiba, and have never seen their real SDK, so I can tell everyone exactly how to do it without signing anything, and I can add the feature to open source programs such as Dolphin (and of course to GlovePIE)!

So give me a few days to perfect the technique, and to get the other new features working, and then the new GlovePIE version will have this awesome new feature!

And in case you were wondering, it doesn’t matter what your Bluetooth address is, or what your Wii Remote’s Bluetooth address is, it will still work.

* I don’t know if “pair” is the correct term. It still doesn’t show up in the “Paired Devices” list, (unlike my girlfriend’s phone which didn’t actually pair correctly when I tried to transfer music to it, but nonetheless is listed in “Paired Devices” but not the main window).

And don’t forget, you can donate with this button to support cool features like this (that took a lot of hacking):

When donating, please include a message with any feature requests or which features you enjoyed. I make no promises to implement those features of course, but it's good to know what people want.