Light Saber/Universal Remote

Yeah the kids lost the TV remote. I hate remotes anyway. I need to control a bunch of devices. Decided to make a gesture-based controller from a raspberry pi. So the problem is that the pi is too big to fit in a hilt. It's about 85.60mm x 56mm x 21mm (or roughly 3.37″ x 2.21″ x 0.83″). What would be a neat way to use the pi as a handheld gesture device like the wii or the dr who sonic screwdriver or a light saber or whatever?

either make a larger version of the hilt....or find out if they can custom configure a pi board to fit the dimensions you need....other than those somewhat costly methods i have no idea....

could make a holocron using the pi....that's what i plan to do eventually...a touchscreen interface is made for the pi raspberry....and they have video and pdf reader apps for the pi os...

That give me some ideas... a wiimote has all the electronics I want for like $30 AND it could fit easily into a hilt AND it can control a rpi holocron which has ir transmitters running out to all the IR devices.

I am very lost by everything you are saying but if you get it to work I want one! :woohoo:

It's like a home theater PC for $35. Here's a good visual demonstration:

ok i want....

could just gut the wiimote and install them in the saber hilt....a little solder and wire and presto...plus that would look pretty cool to wave a saber hilt around and see the onscreen cursor move....

RyuJin wrote: could just gut the wiimote and install them in the saber hilt....a little solder and wire and presto...plus that would look pretty cool to wave a saber hilt around and see the onscreen cursor move....

I was going to stick the whole remote in a hilt and then bam... someone already did it

Have you looked into maybe using an arduino? They're smaller than a Pi and you can really customise it.

I don't know about doing a custom hilt... how would you get the buttons to work right?
If I can figure that out, I may make my lightsaber be an electronic vapourizer for cannabis oil and e-cigs plus a universal wiimote plus a flashlight and maybe I can squeeze a bong in there somewhere, oh and make it look steampunk. I bet it will go over well at airports, hehe

Metsu Desal wrote: Have you looked into maybe using an arduino? They're smaller than a Pi and you can really customise it.

I have one and I believe they can do PWM. They have a newer nano that is 0.73" x 1.70" which would work fine too. I moved away from arduinos because I hate writing code for the AVR micro-controller, uploading it to the arduino, running it, finding out it doesn't work, rewriting, etc. The raspberry pi lets you use any language and just kill a process, costs less, has way better hardware, includes ethernet port, hdmi video port, audio jack, 4 usb ports, camera interface, etc.