[HowTo] Use a Dance Mat to control DVBViewer

[jf2020]

A friend of mine recently pointed to me this article of the Microsoft Research website. After reading this, I thought that some guys have cool jobs at Microsoft and also let’s try and see how it goes to control DVBViewer with a dance mat. So this post is a HowTo and a report on this experience.

 

The dance mat just acts as a standard joystick and each pad is mapped to a button. Usually you will find 10 buttons. As DVBViewer does not (yet?) have an input plugin for a joystick I used a very nice freeware utility called joytokey link. This utility converts each button press to a keyboard sequence that is then interpreted as usual by DVBViewer. To have more commands I’m using the ‘triangle’button as a shift button so one can have up to 18 different commands available.

 

1) Download extract and launch joytokey

2) Verify that your dancemat/joystick is recognized by clicking on the Others tab on the right

3) If everything is OK create a new configuration for DVBViewer

4) Map each button to the correct key sequence for joystick1

5) Define the button that will act as the “shift”for using the configurayion for jostick2

6) Map the buttons for joystick2

7) That’s it!

 

Now to the second step: the experimentation. It very simple:

- place the mat in front of the TV

- put in a locker any other mean to control the HTPC: remote, keyboard, mouse, …

- wait for the next house TV user…

- enjoy!

 

So it works fine and it’s kind of cool to have to stand up from the couch each time I want to change channels or control the volume. However I have to admit that the WAF is rather low while the KAF (Kids Approval Factor) is seriously below zero even if usually they are the ones to play with the dance mat…

 

However you would have notice that you can also use a standard joystick or gamepad (or any kind of joystick that is recognized by joytokey) so I hope that this will be useful to some of you.

I think that I will test it with a Sidewinder. One big improvement would be to have some force feedback working as well. Maybe a feature for DVBViewer 4.0?

Edited March 5, 2006 by jf2020