Whilst it’s great looking at and borrowing someone elses supercar, you wouldn’t want to go to Tesco’s in it, would you? It would be impractical. And so the iPhone proves to be. Here’s the 3 main reasons why I returned the iPhone 3G:

1. It’s difficult to text

With the N95, as with most mobile phones, it’s possible to compose and send text messages with one hand. It’s not straightforward to text on the iPhone – it requires two hands and is fiddly to enter characters using the QWERTY keyboard.

2. Hannah wasn’t happy

Although if I’d really liked it this wouldn’t have been an issue, my wife didn’t like the fact I’d taken out a contract with 02 when I’ve still got a few months remaining on my Orange contract. We get free broadband and VOIP calls with the latter contract, you see… :-p

3. It’s painfully proprietary

Although you can jailbreak it and there are workaround to create your own ringtones on the iPhone, it’s not always straightforward. It makes you feel like you’re using someone else’s device rather than your own. It’s kind of the same reason I bought and then returned a Nintendo Wii earlier this year.

What I’d like to see is a touchscreen tablet, slightly larger than the iPhone, that can connect both to wireless networks and to mobile broadband via HSDPA. I’d carry that around in addition to my N95 (or equivalent). Either that, or something that has a touchscreen and a keyboard…

I was fairly gobsmacked when I came across Johnny Chung Lee’s video of how to create an Interactive Whiteboard using a Nintendo WiiMote and infra-red light pen. It came courtesy of a blog post by Mr Platts (inexplicably down at the time of writing – cached version here). The video by Johnny, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, is here:

Suitably inspired, I went promptly to HMV after school and bought a Nintendo WiiMote. You can get these pretty much anywhere – mine cost £32.99 but you can find them cheaper.

The other thing you need is an infra-red lightpen. These do exist commercially, but I couldn’t find one a) cheap enough, and b) readily available in small enough quantities (i.e. no minimum order). So I decided to make my own. It’s a basic circuit: all you need is an infra-red LED, a small switch, and a battery. I got mine from Maplin Electronics:

• High-power Infra-red Emitting Diode (YH70 – £0.79)
• 1xAAA Battery Box (JY45 – £0.43)
• 7/0.2 Wire 10M Red (BL07 – £1.69)
• Microswitch (GW67 – £1.29) (I chose this because of its size – you don’t actually need 3 poles on your microswitch, but if you do just solder wires to middle and one of outside poles)

I also bought a 30W soldering iron for £2.99, some AAA batteries, and some solder wire but obviously you don’t need these if you’ve already got them!

To make my IR pen easy to hold and on the eye, I decided to take apart a standard Berol DryWipe marker pen used on standard whiteboards. I’m no DIY expert, yet found it easy to take the pen apart and remove the necessary sections with a hacksaw. If I’d had a Dremel, it would have been even easier!

The finished pictures of the finished pen and the circuit it contains can be found in this Flickr set and also below:
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Finally, you can use the WiiMote/IR light pen combo for pretty much anything. The following video shows me turning my standard Macbook screen into a ‘touchscreen’. I’m using the WiiMote Whiteboard software under Mac OSX Leopard, but there is a Windows version too…

You may find the del.icio.us links I’ve collected along the way with the tag wiimote handy!

Excited blog posts and Twitter-comments have been flying back-and-forth across the edublogosphere this week. Why? Because it’s now possible to build a cheap interactive whiteboard using the controller from a Nintendo Wii.

I first came across the idea via Mr Platts’ blog which links to the video by Johnny Chung Lee below. Since then, CoolCatTeacher Vicki Davis has done her usual high-quality synthesis job on what’s out there. As she’s a bit of a beacon, the comments section looks like it’s going to be useful.

What I think everyone’s missed, however, is the fact that mobile phones are due to have projectors built into them in the very near future. This would be an awesome system. You could roll up to do an interactive presentation with nothing but a mobile phone, WiiMote and IR pen. Even better, buy several of the latter and students could use their own phones to do the projecting! I really do think someone needs to set up a web store selling those custom-built infra-red pens. I’d buy one.

Further Reading:

• WiiLearn – a wiki about building and using WiiMote-based Interactive Whiteboards
• Johnny Chung Lee’s website
• WiiMoteProject.com – discusses various uses of WiiMote for projects