Wiimote Project

Ok,

here is what I came up with for an IR pen. I found this pen at walmart. It was an led flashlight pen and I thought it would make a good IR Pen.

At first I just replaced the led with an IR led but that was not going to work as the pen was designed with a plastic lense in the tip to focus the light from the LED.

The second issue was the push button at the end of the pen made it hard to operate as a whiteboard pen. The pen needed a button on the side and I wanted one like a laser pointer has.

After some thought I came up with the idea to drill a hole in the side of the pen and mount a tact switch with a rubber push button to actuate it.

Here is a picture of the finished product.

Hey guys,

I went to radioshack yesterday and bought some of their High-Output ir leds.
Forward Voltage = 1.2V - 1.6V
Wavelength = 940nm
Forward Currnet = 100mA

I'mn pretty sure I got the right ones but they are not bright at all. After I built my pen and tested it out and it seemed to work but not well. If the will was not within 2 feet of my screen it would not pick up the pen. This lead me to some investigation. I started watching some videos on other poeples pens to see what the desired characteristics were. I was noticing that when people were pressing the button on the pen the led was makeing a rather bright light on the camera. I break out my camera and do some tests and I can barley tell the led ligts up. Pointing the pen at the camera you could see it was lit but still it was dim.

I've tried energiser AAA, and rechargable AA batteries but nothing seems to make a differance. So far 2 of the same type leds have produced the same results.

any suggestions as to what I might be doing wrong?