Third party nunchuk plus Arduino

I’ve just got an Arduino to read data from a cheap third party wii nunchuk controller.

Because it wasn’t a genuine controller, it had 5 wires instead of 4 and the colours didn’t match with the tutorials [windmeadow] [TodBot Bionic Arduino class 4, pdf] I could find online.

I had to do a bit of experimentation to find out what went where. Recorded here in case it helps someone and for when, inevitably, I try and do it again in a few months’ time…

Bad photo of something I'm very pleased to have got working :)

Wires

So, not only are there 5 wires instead of 4, but the colour coding is very different too. Opening up the case to the nunchuk and looking at the PCB shows some convenient labels:

GND – brown
SDA – red
SCC – yellow
VDD – blue
also
J1 (seems to be connected to VDD) – white

I managed to break off the white wire at the PCB whilst I was prising off the hot melt glue to look at the labels, and the following worked without re-connecting it…

Code

This post on the Arduino forum shows edits to make to Todbot NunchuckPrint sketch in order to get it to work for third party controllers.

Build

After testing on a breadboard, I soldered the wires to some headers for ease of use later.
With the above code red goes to Analogue 4 and yellow goes to Analogue 5. (Either connect the other two wires to GND and 5V pins, or the code allows for blue to Analogue 3 and brown to Analogue 2.)

And then…

Haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with this yet!