I finally got round to desoldering a Pixart camera sensor from the front of WiiMote and hooking it up to the I2C bus of an Arduino.

Warranty now Void

You need to run a 3.3v regulator, an LTC4301 buffer,  and a 25Mhz clock to the chip, but I’m pleased to report that it works!

It can sit on a standard board (just)

Pixart's new home

LTC4301 - yes it really is that small

(Yay!)

I’m building an updated laser harp and I’ll be adding this new hardware sensor to provide gesture tracking within the laser beams.

This has really cool implications for robots built with an Arduino. Wow, the Arduino can see…

I think Pixart should make these sensors available to mere mortals like us…

Most of the work comes from the Japanese site run by Kako…
(Translation via BabelFish)

Here are some of my annotated notes:

Connecting the Pixart sensor