[Agile] Build your electronic agile-board using a wii-controller

November 30, 2009 - 20:57 CET   -   Tags: scrum kanban wii wiimote If you are in an agile team (Scrum or Kanban) and the team is distributed, it might be hard to find a good solution for the agile board. The solution might be an electronic version. Why not build your own?

Why build an electronic agile board?
The standup meeting is an important tool for an agile team. During this meeting, the team members discuss the status for the tasks in progress and difficulties related to them. So it's important to have the board available and visible for the meeting.

In a distributed team, this might be hard to achieve. You want to have the board in a visible location in the room, so you can easily see status, but it's important that all members can see it. And because of this, the team members often end up duplicating the board into some web system.

By using an electronic agile board, this double work can be avoided. It also allow you can bring up the full description of a tasks during the standup, which makes it easier to discuss what to do. And you can even have the board tell you when it's time for the standup meeting.

An electronic agile board consists of a projector showing the web based system on a wall and either a smartboard or a homebuilt electronic whiteboard using a Wii controller and an IR pen.

Building a wii controlled agile board
What do I need?

• An agile board web UI supporting drag and drop (like Mingle or Scrumy)
• A projector
• Bluetooth on the laptop connected to the projector
• A Wii controller
• An IR pen
• Wiimote Whiteboard from Johnny Chung Lee

The most important part here is the Wii controller. On the tip of the controller, there is a small camera that can track IR sources.

The IR pen
To build an IR pen you need an IR diode (i used a 940nm 100ma), a switch (for switching the diode on and off) and a 1.5 V AAA battery. The price was about $3, and I put everything in a normal whiteboard pen casing. Schematics for such a pen can be found here: Johnny Chung Lee – Pen schematics.

Connecting the Wii controller to the laptop
Download Wiimote Whiteboard from Johnny Chung Lee and unzip. There are some good guides for connecting the controller to the laptop on the Wiimote project page. The steps that works for my laptop:

1. Hold button 1 and 2 on the wii controller (don't let go untill step 6)
2. Click "Add new bluetooth device"
3. When Windows has detected it, click "Next"
4. When asked to enter the pairing code, click skip (if this option is not available you might need to downgrade(!) your bluetooth driver)
5. Check the box and hit next
6. Let go of the buttons on the controller
7. Start Wiimote Whiteboard

Setup
Place the Wii-controller with the camera (the black part on the front) facing the wall or canvas. You might want to put it on the top of a shelve or similar in order to not block it when moving in front of the board. We experimented with taping it to a lamp which worked pretty well. After starting Wiimote Whiteboard, calibrate it by clicking the calibrate button and following the wizard. After the calibration, you can open the browser and start using the board.

Using the pen
The IR pen works as a mouse. Clicking the button somewhere on the board/canvas, is like clicking at the same location on the screen using the mouse. By holding the button, you can also drag and drop.

I've included a short video showing it in action:



Found some other videos as well:

• Virtual Scrum Task Board Using a Wii Remote
• Interactive Mingle Story Wall