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Guide Pearls of Wiisdom from Discord

splain

splain

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Mar 18, 2016
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I’ve posted a couple of things to BitBuilt here and there, but I’ve been lurking in the Wii guides and worklogs for a long time, slowly preparing to make my first Wii portable. I lurked for a long time before I started going on the Discord chat to ask questions there. And I’ve been getting some great answers from the BitBuilt wizards.

So for the benefit of anyone like me, lurking and learning about Wii portables, who isn’t active on Discord, here are some of the great “Pearls of Wiisdom” I learned from Discord over the past week or so. (I already knew some of these, and so do you, but they are worth repeating.)

Thanks to everyone on Discord for providing these answers and other pearls.
  • Building a portable is 80% reading. Read every word of every guide and Wii worklog. Then read them again.
  • If you take apart a Wii, record the serial number and board revision here. https://bitbuilt.net/forums/index.p...iis-revision-based-off-of-serial-numbers.716/
  • The trimming guide, power regs guide, PortablizeMii, board revision guide, and all the other invaluable resources on this site are the result of a LOT of hard work by smart people who have made their findings very accessible and simple for noobs like me. It’s all very well researched and proven, not “eh, that’s just how everyone does it.” Unless you’ve put in the same hours and hours of research, it’s unlikely for a noob to be able to improvise an improvement upon something like the OMGWTF trim.
  • The Wii gets hot, and cooling it is an important thing that has to be taken seriously, not as an afterthought. This is one of the big reasons to use a 4-layer board (which runs cooler) instead of a 6-layer board.
  • Get a brand-name Dremel. If shopping for a Dremel, get one with variable speed.
  • Do as much wiring and testing as you can before you trim the board down to size, but do the power regs after trimming. Trimming doesn’t make anything work better; make sure everything works fantastically before trimming.
  • Test every granular change you make. Don’t make a bunch of changes between tests, or else problems will be hard to pin down.
  • Wire a controller to your board pretty early on, so that you can do good testing. Simply booting doesn’t test everything.
  • Building a good portable costs money. It’s better to spend money on good power regs, screen, tools, etc. than worry about them and wish you had spent the money when they break. Buying a good part is cheaper than buying an ok part, and then also buying the good part later. Nobody wants a broken portable.
  • Similarly, start with a project that is within your league of knowledge and experience. It’s awesome to read about the boundary-pushing projects that the more experienced modders are doing, and it’s fun to dream about making one yourself, but those are not the first portables they have made. For your first portable, pick a form factor that lets you stick to well-documented methods and simpler overall design. Building a basic portable is a challenge, and making it reliable and stable is a much bigger achievement than failing at something that’s too complicated. If you bite off more than you can chew, you can easily find yourself getting frustrated, burning through lots of Wiis, money, and time, and then you still don’t have a Wii portable.
  • Get some magnet wire like the stuff on the BOM. It really is great.
  • Make sure you know about the batteries you’re using. Different batteries, even two Li-Ions of the exact same size, have different chemistry that affects things like acceptable minimum voltage. Make sure your discharge protection and low-battery indicator (if you use one) are tuned to your specific batteries.

For more priceless Wiisdom, join us on Discord!
 
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