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Worklog Ashida build. My first portable.

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Hello! Long time lurker... Finally decided to give it a shot and build a portable. For obvious reasons I decided to go with an Ashida. Even with all the hard work from the community making this build as streamline as it is, it's still a heck of a challenge, but I'm having a ton of fun with it.

I first started with the case. I have an Ender 3 (albeit heavily modified) and I wasn't sure it was up to the task... But decided to give it a shot and started with that because no case means no build. I'm not from the US so ordering from PCBWay was out of the question and the local resin printing services I was able to find were insanely expensive... So PLA it is!

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To my surprise, it ended up looking way better than expected. I decided to print it in a vertical orientation so that the screw posts would be attached as strongly as possible to the case. They will of course split open when screwing on them but whatcha gonna do. I could probably reinforced them, but they're holding on just fine.

Sadly I didn't think about taking pictures because I SUCK at documenting lol. I did film a few videos but I can only share pictures here so I'll take screenshots from them I suppose? lol

I assembled the controller and screen to have a preview of what it would lool like. I didn't like the surface imperfections so I decided to sand and paint the thing. I never did that before so we'll see how that goes...

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Anyway... on to the fun stuff... I trimmed the motherboard, sanded it and tried to boot it.

I sanded it and measured all the resistances through all the voltage lines making sure they're in the ballpark of all the other reported resistances and everything looked good...

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After much, MUCH troubleshooting I managed to get it to boot. I don't know why it didn't want to boot at first... The voltages did look a bit low but I don't think it was the battery, which wasn't full but measured 3.9v... U10 seem like it was correctly attached and it was receiving voltage, the composite line wasn't screwed up as it measured 75 ohms which makes sense since it's terminated with a 75 ohm resistor... I checked the borders VERY carefully with a magnifying glass and there was no spots that looked like it needed more sanding/cleaning... I rewired it with thicker wires out of desperation (the ones in the picture are the cables it had when it DIDN'T work) and it FINALLY booted, so I dunno.

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Anyway, I'll get some more proper pictures and update when the clear coat on the case dries and I can start wiring it up.

Cheers to all and hope you all have a wonderful 2025.
 
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Update:

I "Finished" putting it together. I used 28 AWG wire because I'm stubborn and it's what I had lol. Anyway, the console works but there are a few issues here and there. Mainly the PMS-2 board keeps getting undetected randomly and I got some random crashes on RVLoader. Games don't crash but sometimes they don't launch in 4:3 mode depending on what the console detects it has. I ended up re-routing the SDW and SCW wires out of other wires since that's what people experiencing random crashes have said it works for them but it didn't really seem to do anything for me.

Also I'm having some issues with the gc+ 2.0 board... When I use the sticks wizzard it crashes the console after the stick calibration phase. Booting into safe mode and trying to reset the sticks throws a list of "failed to read" and "failed to write" to EEPROM. This happens 100% of the time. I did notice that using GND from the dd board into GC has a lot of issues so I moved the GND wire into the wii board itself and this improved controls stability but didn't solve the saving to eeprom issues from the gc board... I have no idea what's up with that.

I ordered 34 AWG wire and will be re-doing all the data lines with that, I'll see if that helps. I suspect that maybe (MAYBE) the thicker wire is perhaps more susceptible to EMI, I didn't consider this before. I thought that the AWG requirement was a suggestion to make your life easier when wiring.

Sound seems to work fine, video looks amazing with the dd board.

Anyway, I'll leave a picture of the wiring, I'll take more when I'm redoing the wiring when the new one arrives.

Cheers and happy start of the new year!

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Stitches

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The flexibility provided by smaller wire gauge also helps to protect the via. Thicker wires create more torque on the solder joint when moved, and are liable to break traces, rip vias out accidentally, and sometimes scratch their enamel coating off and cause shorts. Using 32 to 38AWG enameled solid core wire prevents all of that, and makes wire routing easier in general.
 
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That's actually a good point that I didn't consider... Yeah probably a good thing that I invest the time in rewiring the thing lol
 
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Ok so I finished rewiring the console using 34 awg wire. I'm kicking myself from not having done this from the start.

Anyway... most of my glitches seem to be solved now. PMS-2 is now detected 100% of the time I booted the console, everything seems to be great. I did experience some weird stuff when I first tested it where the console would crash when plugging in a usb-c plug to charge... I noticed that when the casing of the plug made contact with the plug on the console, it would crash... So i simply added a few more ground wires (not pictured) and that issue seems to be solved now.


The only glitch I do still have, and I'm not sure it's my wiring that's causing it, is the stick wizard crashes when it reaches the "test the sticks" part. You first rotate them then it asks you to move and test them, the console crashes there all the time. Also booting into safe mode and doing the "reset sticks" still brings up the error reading/writting to EEPROM. Not sure if that's a known issue or what... This is the only thing wrong with my ashida as of now.

Any ideas?

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Ok it's better but I'm still having issues.

The weirdest one being the controllers seem to reset ONLY when playing gamecube games. I can play Mario Kart Wii for hours and it would be 100% fine. Then I boot up Wind Waker, Paper Mario TTYD, Zelda TP GC, whatever and after a few minutes the controllers seem to "reset" and would take the stick 0 position as however I was holding it at the time. Kinda like when you plug int a controller while holding the stick into one direction. If I leave the stick and pause the game, the controller would eventually reset again and everything would be normal.

This already happened before however now it only happened to me I think once in more than 10 minutes of gameplay, where before I would experience it like every 40 seconds or something. I again added more ground wires and reflown the gc+ board to see if that helps... We'll see.

Then RVLoader itself now detects PMS-2 100% of the time BUT it still crashes randomly while browsing the launcher... Games do not crash.
 

Stitches

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That's an odd spread of issues that I can't say I remember seeing before. My best guess for the controller dropout would be something funky with the controller 1 data wire. It might be worth probing the back side of RA1 to check that it is properly receiving 3.3v. I have a vague remembery that if that array fails, then the controller lines will experience random fuckery
 
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I'll check it out... So far it hasn't happened again. And again, the weirdest thing is that I only experienced it by running GC games... It NEVER happened, even with the old wiring, while playing Wii games... I played a ton of Mario Kart Wii on it and never experienced that issue. With the old wiring GC games were basically unplayable since it would happen every 40 seconds to a minute. Now I only have seen it once.

And I'm very puzzled as to why sticks wizard crashes 100% of the time and the reset sticks option throws read/write eeprom errors... Not a huuuuge deal since the controllers work fine (other than the random dropout issue) but still puzzled as to why the eeprom seems to be failing on the GC+ 2 board.
 

deesil

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Can you try to calibrate the fan and see if you get lock ups? I've been unable to get through calibration. Generally if I spend too much time in RVLoader the system freezes.

FWIW I've been struggling with a DDv2 Ashida. It locks up in RVLoader and sometimes in GC games. When it does it usually exhibits I2C errors (shows temp as -273, 0% battery, etc...). A reboot often clears the issues. Might take one or two reboots.

I had some controller issues but solved them by redoing the GCD line. I hadn't had any controller issues until today when it froze (while playing fight night 2) and a few seconds later, I2C lock up.
 
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At this point I'm not sure what's helping and what isn't lol... So my latest changes were basically adding a few more ground points, and re-routing the I2C and GCD cables. I basically routed them going to the top-right side of the console and I ran them on top of the RVL-DD and held them together with kapton tape, but also I avoided having them on top of the GPU caps.

My previous wiring had SDW and SCW cables going to the UAMP too, and I later noticed that was unnecessary as I'm using analog volume controls... So this time I wired them directly to the PMS board.

At times, RVLoader seems much more stable. At one point I had it open close to 10 minutes until it finally crashed, but there are other times where I can only have it open for like 2, maybe 3 minutes tops. I was able to complete a fan calibration but this to me was completely useless, the fan listed on the BOM is a POS and only likes being run at full speed. Another user suggested using a different fan that apparently does like to have a speed curve and seems to work fine. I'll probably give that a try in the future.

So far, after the re-wiring I never had the missing temp and battery again. Knocking on wood, of course.

Does stick wizard work for you?
 

deesil

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You're right, the fan is garbage. If it wasn't the first part installed I'd replace it, but that's going to be a pain.

I can run the stick wizard. But if I'm in RVLoader for more than a minute or two (most times) it will freeze.

Keep me posted. I might start a thread for DD users. I want to find people using the DD who don't have problems. They would disprove my hypothesis which is that there's an issue with the DD and the I2C lines. I would love to collect data on this in a slightly more formal way.
 
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I was also considering asking if there are users with absolutely no issues on RVLoader with the DD lol... Might be interesting to see a picture of their wiring and gather as much data as possible.

Yes. I can finish the fan calibration, and RVLoader seems much more stable than before. It still crashes, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be. I browsed it for a solid 7~ish minutes or so yesterday before it crashed. I don't need to speedrun "pick a game any%" in order to play something.

I get the feeling that whatever the issue is, is caused by some form of intereference, or maybe lack of grounding or whatever. maybe a faraday cage would help? lol
 
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UPDATE:

I decided to try something out... I removed all the audio components that were useless for the build and see if that improved things somewhat. Maybe random useless caps might be hurting stability? well for one thing, I can now FINALLY complete the "sticks wizard". I was never able to finish that before, it would crash the UI after the C-Stick part. Now it works flawlessly.

As for RVLoader? Well the first test I left the console on and sitting on RVLoader... Long enough for the battery to drop from 72% to 67%... I was beginning to write this post and it finally crashed lol. Oh well, at least it's usable.

IMG_3537.jpeg
 

Stitches

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Interesting........ that sounds to me like a bit of voltage instability. I'll add removing the pre-amp to the troubleshooting list
 
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So just for the sake of curiosity, I never installed the old driver board... Did all these crashes on RVLoader began with the new DD board? Is there anyone that successfully installed the DD board and did not experience crashes whatsoever?

BTW I'm gonna try using the SDW and SCW pads on the DD board instead of the flex. Because at this point why not? lol

UPDATE: Ok, soldering to the pads on the DD board did nothing. Oh well...
 
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Alright, I think I nailed it. I swapped the SDW and SCW cables with twisted 34 awg pairs to ground and the console just works pretty much flawlessly. It's been sitting in my desk charging and on the status screen for a solid 20 minutes now without crashing. Of course it needs more testing but I've never made it this far before.

I didn't even use any fancy routing, bot pairs go right across the console like everybody does. For grounding, on the PMS I used the GND pad right next to U10, and on the wii board I used the GND pad on the RVL-DD Flex. I'm going to sleep now (It's 3:50 AM over here lol) and I'll continue to monitor it tomorrow. I'll post pictures if I can confirm that the crashing issue is gone.
 

deesil

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AWESOME! Good luck. Very curious to see how this plays out.

I had originally run twisted 34g wires but I was seeing lock ups. I redid the routing and used 30g because @dubesinhower had a twitter post where he suggested that might help to resolve some issues. I talked with Aurelio on the discord and his comment was that wrapping the wires wouldn't have an effect; that routing was more likely the culprit.

But I'm VERY open to trying something else (wrapping) to see if it fixes my ongoing issues. You're definitely getting better results than I am. Grounding is hard. When I did mine I actually scratched off some solder mask near the flex cable and made a dedicated ground point on the Wii. In my case I was originally running PMS -> Interface Board -> Flex, so I had to find a ground point on the Interface board. I ended up running a small wire across the interface board to a ground point on the west side of that board. Hacky, no doubt.

My current routing goes PMS -> Flex AND Interface -> Flex. So each runs a dedicated line to the Wii where they come together. Unfortunately, I managed to lift the pad on the flex cable for one of the lines (SDW I think), so I had to run a small bit of 30g wire from the via/solder point on the flex to the wires that I had brought over. All this complexity could certainly be affecting performance. Once that pad came off (and I swear I was being gentle and loving to it) things became more challenging. Short of either removing the flex (I don't have a hot air gun) or replacing the wii and using the second flex, this is what I've got.
 
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It might be a combination of all factors, honestly. Hell, even ground loops might be playing its part here... I remember at one point I can't remember what ground cable I added from the wii board to the controllers PCBs and this caused the console to crash out (even glitching the screen) when I connected the USB-C Charger. As soon as the sleeve of the connector made contact with the outside of the connector in the PMS-3 board (as in not even inserting the plug, just making contact with it), the screen would glitch out and the console woud crash. Removing that ground wire fixed that issue.

I have also been seeing issues with the GCD cable... Depending on the routing, I would have this issue where the controller would at some point "reset" and the stick would take the 0 position as to however you were holding it at the time. Depending on the roting of that cable this could happen every like 30-40 seconds or even after like 5 solid minutes. Re-routing the cable seems to help with this but I'm not sure I have fixed this 100%.

So far though, I haven't seen RVLoader crash since the addition of the twisted pair wires. I did say I didn't do any fancy routing but I was careful to avoid making them go right across the GPU caps. I do not have any idea what I'm talking about here but I do suspect that maybe that is a source of interference.
 
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