Wii Fit Leg Extenders

I discovered that the Wii Fit has leg extensions that attach to the bottom of the balance board. The Wii Fit works on nearly any kind of surface, including carpet, but when using it on carpet, you may want to use the extenders for better accuracy. With long carpet, the game might otherwise report too low a weight.

A few quick searches on Google didn’t bring up any photos of the extenders, so I decided to take some.

Here’s the bottom of the Wii Balance Board.

A leg without the extender.

Leg with the extender. You can easily tell it’s on due to the three rectangles around the side.

Other side of the leg extender.

So how does the Wii Balance Board work? My guess is that the legs actually measure the pressure. That means there are four sensors, one at each corner. My initial guess was that the four sections of the board were sensors, but that part of the board actually seems rigid. This is probably a good thing, because it should be very durable and last a long time.

I read that in Europe, the leg extenders were attached by default, but in the U.S., they weren’t. That’s kind of interesting because it makes you seem lighter than you really are, if you use it on long carpet without the extenders.

Thanks to my friend Simon for allowing me to borrow his Wii Fit. Fortunately, he had the leg extenders attached.

We played Wii Fit on carpet today, and had no problems at all with our carpet. It reported an accurate weight for all but one, but we’re not sure if the measurement he got from the doctor was really accurate :)