Maker of the Month: OpenMote Puts an ESP32-S3 Inside Your Old Wii Remote

Somewhere in your house there is probably a Wii Remote that hasn't been picked up in a decade. September's Maker of the Month is built on the idea that it deserves better than a junk drawer.

OpenMote comes from Hat & Hammer, the Los Angeles duo of Ezra Bird and Samson Taxon. It's a replacement circuit board that fits inside a standard Wii Remote shell. Nintendo's original electronics come out, an ESP32-S3 goes in, and the controller you already know how to hold becomes a programmable handheld that can run a smart home, clone an infrared remote, pair as a Bluetooth gamepad, or steer a robot across the living room.

The Crowd Supply campaign opened on September 15, and the audience arrived quickly. More than 700 people in 31 countries backed it in the first eight days, and the count passed 1,000 by October 1.

The core is an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 module: dual-core, up to 240MHz, with 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM. That is a lot of headroom for a remote, and it starts to matter once audio, motion processing, and a couple of wireless stacks are all running in the same firmware.

The rest of the board fills in everything the shell has room for:

Put together, this is less a remote with some extras and more a full ESP32 development platform that happens to live in one of the most recognizable enclosures in gaming.

A typical living room doesn't run on a single standard. The TV and the air conditioner expect infrared. The lights and thermostat sit on Wi-Fi. The streaming box and the laptop want Bluetooth. OpenMote covers all three from the same handful of buttons.

For smart-home use, the board ships preflashed with ESPHome firmware for Home Assistant. Buttons, LEDs, and the motion sensor all show up as things an automation can use, so a single press can dim the lights and start a movie, and another can shut the house down for the night. Hat & Hammer says the remote can also pair directly with Apple Home and Amazon Alexa over Wi-Fi.

All of it runs locally. There is no cloud account to create and no subscription to pay, and the remote keeps working when the internet connection drops.

Infrared goes both ways. Point an existing remote at OpenMote, let it capture the signal, and it can replay that command later from a button or an automation. That is good news for hardware that will never get a smart-home integration of its own: an older TV, a stereo receiver, a window AC unit, a cheap LED strip controller.

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Given the shape, this part was inevitable. OpenMote pairs as a standard Bluetooth LE HID gamepad, so a PC, an Android phone or tablet, or a Steam Deck sees an ordinary controller with no special drivers. Motion input works too, including in the Dolphin emulator.

One thing it can't do is talk to an actual Wii. The original console uses Bluetooth Classic, and the ESP32-S3 only speaks Bluetooth LE.

The same radio lets OpenMote act as a Bluetooth keyboard or media remote, which makes it a handy way to navigate an Android TV, Google TV, or Fire TV box.

Nothing about OpenMote is tied to one firmware image. Underneath, it's a normal ESP32-S3, so Arduino IDE, PlatformIO, and ESP-IDF all work, and flashing happens over the same USB-C port that charges the battery. No separate programmer is needed. Hat & Hammer is building an Arduino library with a working example for each onboard peripheral.

For people who would rather not write code, the team is developing OpenMote Studio, a companion app where you plug in over USB-C, choose what you want the remote to be, and flash it with one click.

That range is what makes the project appealing. Someone who only wants a better couch remote can get there without opening an IDE, while the low-level access makers expect from an ESP32 is still fully available.

Expansion pushes it further. The Qwiic / STEMMA QT connector accepts hundreds of Adafruit and SparkFun breakouts with a single cable, no soldering or level shifting required. ESP-NOW lets the remote talk straight to other ESP32 boards with no router in between, which is exactly what you want for a robot or RC car. Add gesture input from the IMU and feedback through the speaker, rumble motor, and LEDs, and "universal remote" starts to feel like an undersized label.

OpenMote is sold two ways.

The Ready To Go version costs $99 and arrives as a finished remote with the board installed, the battery in place, and firmware already flashed.

The Mod Your Own version costs $59 and includes the board with its battery, ready to drop into a Wii Remote you already own. The original shell, buttons, membrane, and battery cover are all reused, so the buttons keep their familiar feel. The swap takes four screws and one connector, with no soldering or cutting.

Backers have a clear favorite. In the first week, about six of every ten units ordered were the bare board, which was more than the team expected. There are evidently a lot of old Wii Remotes waiting for something to do.

One caution for anyone going the DIY route: not every shell is identical. Hat & Hammer says the board has fit every standard remote it has tested, including the ones marked Wii MotionPlus Inside, but some special editions have different internals and fit isn't guaranteed for every donor.

Hat & Hammer has committed to open-sourcing the project before units ship. That release is meant to cover the schematics, PCB layouts, bill of materials, Arduino library, and Home Assistant firmware. For a device aimed at makers, it means that even where the official software falls short, the information needed to take it somewhere new should be available.

It is worth being clear about where things stand today. The firmware and the Studio app are still in development, and the open-source release is a promise that hasn't been delivered yet.

The hardware side looks further along. The design has gone through three full board generations, and beta units are already with independent creators. Elecrow is handling PCB fabrication and assembly through its Project Aviary partnership with Crowd Supply, with worldwide fulfillment through Mouser. Orders are currently slated to ship at the end of February 2027, and the team names component availability as its biggest schedule risk.

There is also a nice bit of maker ingenuity in how the board came together. Without access to Nintendo's original CAD, the team exported the design from KiCad into a 3D printing slicer and printed fully populated dummy boards in plastic. Snapping those into real shells revealed every collision before any actual PCBs were ordered.

Funding stays open through October 29, and Crowd Supply says OpenMote will remain available in its store after the campaign ends.

At $59 and $99, this isn't priced like a bare ESP32 board, and it shouldn't be compared to one. You're getting a battery, a dozen buttons, motion sensing, audio in and out, infrared, haptics, and (if you need it) a finished enclosure, along with a software stack built for the hardware.

The maker projects that stick with us are rarely the ones with the biggest spec sheets. More often, they're the ones that look at something familiar and see a different use for it.

The Wii Remote is close to twenty years old, and its design has held up remarkably well. It's comfortable, it works one-handed, and almost anyone can pick it up and understand it. Hat & Hammer could have designed yet another plastic case around an ESP32. They built a board that gives millions of existing controllers a second career.

They also went well past the obvious version of the idea. A Wi-Fi remote in a Wiimote shell would have been a fun weekend project. OpenMote adds Bluetooth, two-way infrared, motion, audio, haptics, Home Assistant support, and real expansion options, all on a platform its owner can reprogram at will.

It might run your TV today, your whole house tomorrow, and somebody's robot the week after that.

That's the kind of hardware experimentation we like to see. OpenMote is the Solid State Bytes Maker of the Month for September 2026.