The whole wiimote whiteboard system relies on the infrared camera in the end of the wiimote being able to 'see' the infrared light from the pen. Commonsense says that if the camera is blocked from seeing the pen's light it cannot work. Actually, in real usage, this very rarely happens because users soon learn where to stand / how to hold the pen for best results.
However, there is one other way that the the pen can be blocked from working properly and that is by too much sunlight. To understand what happens you have to know that sunlight contains infrared light. The human eye cannot see this type of light but the wiimote camera certainly can. If the sunlight is very strong, it is possible for the infrared light in it to overpower the infrared light from the pen.
When this happens you get a condition we at 3Pi call 'crazy mouse' - the cursor starts hopping all over the whiteboard and random programmes start to open and shut. We haven't had it happen for a long time as it is easy to avoid, but back in the early days of testing it had us quite perplexed! The simplest way to avoid any possibility of it occurring is to stop direct sunlight streaming across the whiteboard. This is a bit of a 'no brainer' really as most data projectors don't work well under these conditions.
Occasionally the level of sunlight in general is very high. The Smoothboard software has a built in option that can help with this. Under the settings tab you will find a control that lets you adjust the sensitivity of the wiimote. You can turn it down to make it less sensitive to the sunlight. This is worth doing if you have a permanently mounted wiimote. However, in most other cases, we find that most people simply pull the curtains a bit.
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