There is probably a Wii Remote in a drawer somewhere in your house, its white plastic yellowing, a pair of dead AA batteries rattling inside. A team called Hat & Hammer looked at that same forgotten controller and saw a shell worth saving. Their project, OpenMote, guts the two-decade-old electronics and drops in a modern brain, so the wand you once waved at Wii Sports can now flip the lights in your living room.
What they actually built
OpenMote is a drop-in replacement PCB shaped to fit inside the classic Wii Remote housing with no soldering. The original board pops out, the OpenMote board slots in, and the buttons you already know keep working. Underneath sits an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 module: a dual-core chip clocked up to 240 MHz, 16 MB of flash, and 8 MB of PSRAM, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 LE on board. Of the 12 button contacts, 11 are free to program while one handles power.
How it pulls off the smart-home trick
Two things make the home-control magic work. A 940 nm IR emitter paired with a 38 kHz IR receiver lets OpenMote learn signals from your existing remotes and play them back, so it can stand in for a TV clicker. At the same time, its Wi-Fi radio can fire Home Assistant scenes straight from the physical buttons, and ESP-NOW lets it talk to other boards without a router in between. A six-axis IMU adds accelerometer and gyroscope data for motion controls, complete with interrupt lines that wake the board on movement. Hat & Hammer also packed in a MAX98357A amplifier pushing 3.2 W to a mono speaker, a PDM MEMS mic, a haptic motor, and a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector on the I2C bus for bolting on extra sensors. A 1,200 mAh lithium cell and USB-C charging at 500 mA finally retire those AA batteries.
Why this one is worth watching
Because it runs an ESP32-S3, you can write firmware in Arduino, ESP-IDF, PlatformIO, or CircuitPython, and a dedicated Arduino library is planned to expose the buttons, IMU, and radios without digging through registers. The whole design is open source: schematics, PCB layouts, bill of materials, and examples are set to drop before units ship. Pricing is not announced yet, but you can follow it on Crowd Supply. It is a tidy reminder that a good enclosure never really dies, it just waits for a better board.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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