Conceived on Jun 10, 2023
We did it again, internet
If you’ll recall, once upon a time I managed to get my Wii Balance Board to connect to my computer and function as a scale.
At some point throughout the years, Linux changed, and that method broke.
It would still measure your weight fine, but you could no longer activate the balance board by tapping its front button, you had to flip it over, remove the battery compartment lid and press the red button every time.
This was too much of a hassle, so I stopped using the board, hoping that a solution to this problem would arrive one day to liberate me from the scourge of adipose tissue.
This day is today (well, a few months ago, actually, but I couldn’t be arsed writing about it until today, so).
I received an email from a reader called Jawaad Mahmood, who had read my balance board article and spent a bit of time figuring out how to get the balance board to work, and packaged his work into a library called bbev.
I was initially sceptical because many people contacted me throughout the years, but nobody managed to get rid of the red button requirement.
Talking to Jawaad for a bit, though, he confirmed that he could painlessly get the board to pair with his computer with the front button.
Apparently something had changed in the Linux Bluetooth stack, and made pairing possible again, and he managed to figure out how.
This was great news!
However,
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