Part 2. Bluetooth Setup

Raspberry Pi does not come with a built-in bluetooth adapter, something we need to communicate with the Wii Balance Board. We will have to use one of our USB ports to plug in an adapter such as this inexpensive iAnder USB Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy Adapter (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JN5Y5E0).

Once you have your adapter plugged in, go to your Raspberry Pi terminal window and install the bluetooth modules that we will be using in our Python scripts:

$ sudo apt-get install python-bluetooth bluez python-gobject

You can see the address of your bluetooth dongle with the "hcitool dev" command:

$ hcitool dev
Devices:
	hci0	00:1A:7D:DA:71:13

We are now ready to connect and communicate with the Wii Balance Board. We will not be permanently pairing our Board with our Pi like we do with most of our bluetooth devices. The Wii Balance Board was never intended to be paired with anything other than a Wii, and permanent pairing proved to be quite the confusing challenge (if you find an elegant solution for permanent pairing of the Wii Balance Board, please let me know). Pairing will happen every time we run our Python script.

<< Part 2: A Wii Balance Board Scale - Part 2: Reading the Scale >>