The WII Motion Plus Gyro

Now we return to the Quad Copter project picking up with the WII Motion Plus Gyro that will be used as a sensor. I picked one of these up from Amazon.Com for about 10.00 dollars and free shipping. It makes for an inexpensive 3-axis gyro that can be hacked for use in home-brewed electronics experiments. I have been researching the specifics of how to utilize this device. Most of the information I found indicated that the device can be easily polled by a microprocessor with an an I2C interface. The board inside the WII Motion Plus contains an I2C interface, 14 bit ADC and a 3-axis gyro. A lot in a cheap package. I will be getting into the technical aspects of the interface in a later post. This time I am simply going to describe the process of dismantling the Motion Plus to obtain the gyro. It was definitely designed so that it could not be easily unassembled. Two Y-bit screws on the back could not be removed with any of the tools that I have. I tried phillips and hex and square bits and then tried to drill the screws out. Even then the back would not come apart. I then tried to pry the shell apart, but found it was put together tightly and securely. As a result the outside shell was rendered useless by the time I got to the gyro. I feared that the circuitry would be damaged even though I was careful. In the end I managed to remove the gyro from the plastic case. Then I unsoldered the female pass-through port connector. This will allow me to make a cable with a female plug so that I can use the male connector that is attached to the gyro board. Later will begin experimenting with the hardware interface and making use of the data that the gyro provides.