Part 2. Bluetooth Setup

The Raspberry Pi 3 comes with bluetooth built in, all we need to communicate with the Wii Balance Board. If you have a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2, we will have to use one of our USB ports to plug in an adapter.

Power on your Pi (I am assuming you have already installed Raspbian and it boots up) and go to your Raspberry Pi terminal window. You can see the address of your bluetooth dongle with the "hcitool dev" command:

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

Install the bluetooth modules that we will be using in our Python scripts:

$ sudo apt-get install python-bluetooth 

After installation completes, we are 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 a 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 >>