DCS World Steam Edition Using a Wii Balance Board as Pedals

Wii Balance Board As Rudder Pedals Madness!

Using a Wii Balance Board as Pedals image 1

Using a Wii Balance Board as Pedals image 2

Using a Wii Balance Board as Pedals image 3

To set up your Wii Balance Board as rudder pedals, you need to do the following steps:

(1) Get the board talking to your PC via Bluetooth, so you need to set up a Bluetooth stack that works with the Nintendo bits. This is fairly common, as people use WiiMotes as controllers on Wii emulators and the like, and the Wii Balance Board is pretty similar to this.

(2) Download and install the lovely Wii Balance Walker app, that will take this connection and map those inputs to a Virtual Joystick that DCS will understand as a controller.

(3) Enable VJoy as a Virtual Joystick driver (it comes with Wii Balance Walker download).

(4) Configure DCS to recognize and use this new virtual joystick axis as a rudder or tail rotor.

Ok, let's do this:

BlueTooth and the Wii Balance Board

I didn't want to spend any money on this, and my main PC didn't have a bluetooth connector, so I just bought a cheap wee doohickey USB adapter. I got the ASUS BT-400 for $10, i.e. this puppy:

http://www.asus.com/Networking/USBBT400/

I quickly tried step 2 of using the Balance Walker app to try to connect, but it didn't work for, in that I couldn't register it as a connection in Bluetooth using the software that came with the Asus dongle. My advice would be try step 2 first, so see if you get lucky and then come back here if it doesn't.

Different dongles work with different Bluetooth (BT) stacks, and not all stacks will talk to the Nintendo stuff, so I also had to 'force' the asus to work with a BT stack I knew worked with the Wii Balance Board. Your mileage may vary on this, depending on what dongle and stack you get.

I used this guide to put a Toshiba BT stack onto the little Asus dongle:

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Wii_Remote_Plus_%28RVL-CNT-01-TR%29_Connection_Guide#Forcing_the_Toshiba_Drivers_onto_the_Adapter

Note: I had to do the 'force' option of editing the .inf to make it happening. If you struggle on this bit I'll try to help in comments, or you might just have a dongle/BT stack that works.

So after pressing the red 'sync' button on the Balance Board (check batteries!) you get to this window to 'Connect':

Once you are connected then you can move to the next step:

Wii Balance Walker

This app was written to experiment with VR and using the balance board to 'walk' but it can also be used for anything that needs an input. It can be downloaded from here:

http://www.greycube.com/site/download.php?view.68

Once you have downloaded it and extracted into a directory, then you can try doing the 'Add bluetooth Wii device' step. If you did step (1) like me, then I can use the 'Connect to Wii Balance board' button and it connects (the LED on the board light on when this is connected plus you see the numbers wiggle).

Note: the default is 'Disable All Actions' as on, so if you don't get any movement in DCS, do check this first as it fooled me a few times.

So for others settings, we want to use this like a joystick, so have a look at the next bit.

Virtual Joystick

Use the 'Optional_Headsoft_VJoy_1.2 Driver' that came with the Wii Balance Walker zip file and install it. Now set up the option like they are in the above screenshot, i.e. 'Enable Joystick' and 'Do Nothing' in the actions (this means don't use the keyboard, and set it direct to the pretend joystick'.

Yay! Set up DCS

So now we have Bluetooth talking to the Balance Board, the Wii Balance Walker app running and sending stuff to the VJoy virtual joystick. Now let's configure DCS to see that Vjoy stuff.

The trick here (and I don't know if this is for everyone) is to ignore the 'Ninetendo RVL..' controller category (in-fact select that column and 'Clear Category' so as to stop it interfering), plus also ignore the first 'Vjoy Virtual' column as well. What worked for me was that the second 'Vjoy Virtual' worked great (in the image, the one after the 'Sidewinder Force' stick I use for helos. This might just be my system though, so if you only have one Vjoy then you're all good, just don't expect the Nintendo one to work as it needs to 'route' through vJoy.

The JOY_X axis can be used and set up how you like it, i.e. do the AXIS TUNE to set deadzone and how hard you like to press the board for full deflection etc. Using your feed is much better than twisting a stick, plus feels more fun and a (tiny) bit more realistic.

The board is actually really really sensitive and make pretty nice pedals (I actually have proper Saitek pedals, but am playing with this for fun) and while the lack of physical 'push' is not ideal, for $10 it was a fun hack to try (given I already had the dusty board doing nothing). Next steps to try would be perhaps using the 'diagonals' as brake axis, but that isn't something I tried as yet.

Good luck, let us know if this worked for you, plus if you have any questions!

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=355718083

Using a Wii Balance Board as Pedals

Wii Balance Board As Rudder Pedals Madness!

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