This is a long wall of text and pictures so buckle your seat belts kids.
Back in the end of 2020 I discovered this place and then at the beginning of 2021 when Shank posted his video I ordered a G-Boy Kit.
I was eager to try making one after being a copy cat and creating a pair of wavebird joycons like Shank (except I made them black).
Here is the first trim I did back then. I had done the pretests prior to trimming (U10 and VGA tests). All was looking great.
Look here's a picture of it from back then.
(Jan 2021)
But then everything changed when the fire nation attacked. A short from the 3.3v rail to ground of 7ohms. I sanded and sanded.
(Jan 2021)
It haunted me for months
(Apr 2021)
At this point I was pushing 29 and starting my 4th year of Uni, and everything was opening back up, we were returning to class and society, and this project ended up in a box, with its disassembled brethren (A broken gamecube and a 6 layer wii).
But hey University was cool look at this robot controller with Yagoo on it and some FPGA learning boards they forced us to buy that also ended up in that box with the trimmed 4layer wii, and its brethren.
Time passed. All was forgotten.They all sat in a huge plastic tub collecting more miscellaneous wires and console stuff. I moved from one place to the next lugging this box around.
It is now 2025. I recovered the trimmed wii board and checked the resistances again. 3.3v rail to ground of 7ohms still. Made a separate post about this finally (but I posted it in the wrong location) asking for any recommendations. Did some more sanding the board now looks like this.
And Again
Still no luck. Look how round and small it has become. It looks pretty silly at this point, I've watched GingerofOz's videos on G-boy creating/wii trimming multiple times now and at this point I just assume the board is dead and need to do another trim.
I don't really have pictures of this second trim by itself, but I did check all its resistances and got good results and posted it in that other post before. So I moved on to actually opening up the G-Boy box and started putting it together.
It was all looking good, I tested composite and it worked great. and moved onto trying it with VGA.
Thats when the fun ceased. Long story short I could not get the video to show up. And with help from the forum I found that sometimes V and H Sync do not like being wound together and so I undid that. And it worked! I got VGA signal, I shut everything down and went to sleep ready to tackle it again after work the next day.
And suddenly a ground on V-sync. Undid all the wires, still grounded, used solder wick to get any and all solder up from the AVE pins for H and V Sync. Still grounded. Redid some sanding checked all the resistances, everything was fine except for V-sync, still grounded. So I tested composite and it all still worked so it seemed I was not going to get VGA working on this trim. At this point I assume the RVL-AVE is bad and I figured, why not try to use my rework station to remove it and see if it remains. Better start with that really old trim that had the 3.3v to ground short and see if I'm good enough to use this thing since I hadn't used it in many years. I got it off of that old trim and what do you know that 3.3v ground went away. (Shocked Pikachu Face) Well maybe that trim is still ok just need replace that AVE, too bad I removed a bunch of capacitors that were probably needed so we'll ignore it. Back to the more recent trim. I re-flowed the AVE off of it and put my first trim's AVE onto it. The 7ohm 3.3v to ground short appeared on this new trim. Well it's safe to say I have two bad AVE's (1 completely useless, 1 that can at least do composite).
So.... I trimmed a third Wii.
IT WORKS. VGA WORKS, SOUND WORKS. SO HAPPY.... Time to do the MX....
And the MX state is 0. Damn, I'll clean that flux off and try it again. There is a little flux in there so maybe that's the problem. But I am so close to being finished. The finish line is right there, within reach. Any suggestions would be sick.
Back in the end of 2020 I discovered this place and then at the beginning of 2021 when Shank posted his video I ordered a G-Boy Kit.
I was eager to try making one after being a copy cat and creating a pair of wavebird joycons like Shank (except I made them black).
Here is the first trim I did back then. I had done the pretests prior to trimming (U10 and VGA tests). All was looking great.
Look here's a picture of it from back then.
But then everything changed when the fire nation attacked. A short from the 3.3v rail to ground of 7ohms. I sanded and sanded.
It haunted me for months
At this point I was pushing 29 and starting my 4th year of Uni, and everything was opening back up, we were returning to class and society, and this project ended up in a box, with its disassembled brethren (A broken gamecube and a 6 layer wii).
But hey University was cool look at this robot controller with Yagoo on it and some FPGA learning boards they forced us to buy that also ended up in that box with the trimmed 4layer wii, and its brethren.
Time passed. All was forgotten.They all sat in a huge plastic tub collecting more miscellaneous wires and console stuff. I moved from one place to the next lugging this box around.
It is now 2025. I recovered the trimmed wii board and checked the resistances again. 3.3v rail to ground of 7ohms still. Made a separate post about this finally (but I posted it in the wrong location) asking for any recommendations. Did some more sanding the board now looks like this.
Still no luck. Look how round and small it has become. It looks pretty silly at this point, I've watched GingerofOz's videos on G-boy creating/wii trimming multiple times now and at this point I just assume the board is dead and need to do another trim.
I don't really have pictures of this second trim by itself, but I did check all its resistances and got good results and posted it in that other post before. So I moved on to actually opening up the G-Boy box and started putting it together.
It was all looking good, I tested composite and it worked great. and moved onto trying it with VGA.
Thats when the fun ceased. Long story short I could not get the video to show up. And with help from the forum I found that sometimes V and H Sync do not like being wound together and so I undid that. And it worked! I got VGA signal, I shut everything down and went to sleep ready to tackle it again after work the next day.
And suddenly a ground on V-sync. Undid all the wires, still grounded, used solder wick to get any and all solder up from the AVE pins for H and V Sync. Still grounded. Redid some sanding checked all the resistances, everything was fine except for V-sync, still grounded. So I tested composite and it all still worked so it seemed I was not going to get VGA working on this trim. At this point I assume the RVL-AVE is bad and I figured, why not try to use my rework station to remove it and see if it remains. Better start with that really old trim that had the 3.3v to ground short and see if I'm good enough to use this thing since I hadn't used it in many years. I got it off of that old trim and what do you know that 3.3v ground went away. (Shocked Pikachu Face) Well maybe that trim is still ok just need replace that AVE, too bad I removed a bunch of capacitors that were probably needed so we'll ignore it. Back to the more recent trim. I re-flowed the AVE off of it and put my first trim's AVE onto it. The 7ohm 3.3v to ground short appeared on this new trim. Well it's safe to say I have two bad AVE's (1 completely useless, 1 that can at least do composite).
So.... I trimmed a third Wii.
IT WORKS. VGA WORKS, SOUND WORKS. SO HAPPY.... Time to do the MX....
And the MX state is 0. Damn, I'll clean that flux off and try it again. There is a little flux in there so maybe that's the problem. But I am so close to being finished. The finish line is right there, within reach. Any suggestions would be sick.
