Worklog G-Wii: My First Electronics Project

[GingerOfOz]

You've cycled through all the inputs to be absolutely sure you're on the right one, right?

 

[ToddyHD]

That 1 you see is actually on the plastic on top of the screen.
Got a pic of the bottom of the board?

Oh I didn't know that. For some reason I cannot get my screen controls to work either. I've wired up menu and when I click it nothing comes up. I'm getting a voltage increase when I depress the button. I've wired up GND from the keyboard to the Wii, VCC from the keyboard to the screen driver board and KEY from keyboard to driver board but still no response or output on the screen. Is there anything else/checks I can do apart from basic continuity tests between pins?

Here are pics:

EDIT:
So I managed to cycle through to the AV1 source - the other screen was obviously for VGA. I am still getting a blue screen - it goes black for like 1-2 seconds and then back to no signal.

 

[ToddyHD]

EDIT 14/1/2019

I re-wired my internal batteries, wired up most of the GC+, JacksonS audio amp and my screen. I placed everything in the back half of the case as best as I could to conserve space. Here are more pictures of the current internals

A couple of small updates here for the worklog! I've been working pretty hard on this lately as I want to get it done before I start my new job in 2 months time!

As for my first Wii, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. The voltage regulators were outputting the correct voltages and there were no shorts to GND that I could find anywhere... I do remember putting 3.3v into my 1.15v line accidentally and switching the Wii on (maybe that's what accidentally killed my first board?)

Anyway, I have a new board that is coming that has been tested and fully functional. I got pretty upset after wiring Bluetooth, U10 and getting it to work, followed by the board not booting up after trimming. I'm sure a lot of you know the feeling of putting in so much effort only to then be stumped with troubleshooting. Luckily wiis are cheap! Whoever would like a dead Wii please, let me know and I'll send it your way.

Here are some more pics - I am starting to wire everything internally. I also fixed up my battery wiring so that it's not moms spaghetti inside. It's all starting to come together and I am super excited! Just have to live up to the Gman internals now. I really like the paint job - it turned out pretty well I think!

Starting to look smexy. Love that the G-Wii looks OEM, you couldn't even tell that this was homemade. Gman did a great, no, an incredible job with the CAD work.
( ͡º ͜ʖ ͡º)

Low battery indicator - working just need to run the console to find the correct voltage for it to come on - I am thinking around 6.2v for 18650 x2 in series.

Once I get my Wii I'll wire that up and we are well on the way to having another G-Wii come to fruition

 

[SimiamiDrew]

Awesome Worklog! I'm a complete noob, but where did you find the "recipe" for this project? I've foundGman's CAD files but cannot seem to find any singular well documented worklog with every detailed described. I've managed to find parts of the build process on many different pages (trimming, batteries, The CAD/3D printing files) but no one singular/unified guide to completing this awesome project. I would really appreciate if you could tell me where to find "The guide" or how you are managing to do this great project

 

[ToddyHD]

Awesome Worklog! I'm a complete noob, but where did you find the "recipe" for this project? I've foundGman's CAD files but cannot seem to find any singular well documented worklog with every detailed described. I've managed to find parts of the build process on many different pages (trimming, batteries, The CAD/3D printing files) but no one singular/unified guide to completing this awesome project. I would really appreciate if you could tell me where to find "The guide" or how you are managing to do this great project

Unfortunately there is no step-by-step "recipe" so to speak on how to make a portable. There's too many functioning parts that go into it for there to be a guide, and even if there is one, it would be impossible to troubleshoot your own portable if something went wrong if you simply connected the electrical dots to make it. I learned everything through reading the noob threads, the guide submissions, the regulator guide, pretty much any guide I could get my hands on I read and read many times over, with extensive googling and question asking on the forums.

That being said, the best way to start a project would be to assemble your parts for the G-Wii, which are all located in the CAD file thread uploaded by G-Man. I also thought it'd be impossible to make a portable without some sort of guide but I am managing just fine. In fact, I've learned a hell of a lot over the past 3-4 months of just reading and asking questions on the discord. I absolutely would not have learned about electronics if I was just babied through with a recipe. Get electronics books, watch Shank's Electronics Basics Videos. I'd recommend strongly that you do. It's really satisfying to understand what is going inside, and if any issues arise, you can save yourself time and money by fixing it yourself.

There is no guide, but the members here are all really friendly and without them I wouldn't have been able to get this far. Read, ask questions and don't be afraid to do research and you'll have a working portable in no time

PS: Here is the current internals/externals for the G-Wii. I had to sand the insides of the button holes a little to make them fit and press the tact switches underneath smoothly which I was upset about (make sure your buttons fit nicely before painting!) so I have bought some touch up paint to fix those at a later stage. Open to any advice on how to fix the small chips. They haven't gone into the primer and are very very small! (See below). Was planning on using a paint marker or small tin of flat white Tamiya paint with a brush to blend it in, followed by buffing out the area.

Pics + unofficial noods below:

 

[ToddyHD]

Here is my 3rd Wii trim that I just trimmed today. I've left the AV port on this time just to make troubleshooting slightly easier as last time I was getting no signal, so this way I can hook it up to an external monitor to ensure that my 5 inch screen isn't the issue. I didn't get to test U10 before trimming as I removed some of the onboard inductors for the onboard regulation which was a mistake. I've tested continuity of all of the pads of the original U5 to ensure that I haven't burnt anything off and all seems good there.

I measured the resistance between all voltages and GND and between voltage lines and none are shorted. I sanded the board down with 200, 400, 600 and 800 grit sandpaper until the internal layers were not bridged. Here are some pictures of the top and bottom of the OMGWTF trim - if anyone sees any issues please let me know! I made the trim slightly wider than usual maybe by a few mm to ensure I didn't get close to any critical NAND traces or components. I will test this board this weekend and hopefully have a working trim to put inside of the G-Wii. I have also got a breakout board coming for my regulators which should make it somewhat easier to wire up the PTHs instead of soldering directly to the regs themselves.

She's all taped ready to be cut

OMGWTF with an AV port for testing:

Back of the board:

Fingers crossed that the third time really is the charm

 

[Dominatory]

Here is my 3rd Wii trim that I just trimmed today. I've left the AV port on this time just to make troubleshooting slightly easier as last time I was getting no signal, so this way I can hook it up to an external monitor to ensure that my 5 inch screen isn't the issue. I didn't get to test U10 before trimming as I removed some of the onboard inductors for the onboard regulation which was a mistake. I've tested continuity of all of the pads of the original U5 to ensure that I haven't burnt anything off and all seems good there.

I measured the resistance between all voltages and GND and between voltage lines and none are shorted. I sanded the board down with 200, 400, 600 and 800 grit sandpaper until the internal layers were not bridged. Here are some pictures of the top and bottom of the OMGWTF trim - if anyone sees any issues please let me know! I made the trim slightly wider than usual maybe by a few mm to ensure I didn't get close to any critical NAND traces or components. I will test this board this weekend and hopefully have a working trim to put inside of the G-Wii. I have also got a breakout board coming for my regulators which should make it somewhat easier to wire up the PTHs instead of soldering directly to the regs themselves.

She's all taped ready to be cut
View attachment 8014
OMGWTF with an AV port for testing:
View attachment 8015
Back of the board:
View attachment 8016

Fingers crossed that the third time really is the charm

good luck mate hope it goes well

 

[DeoNaught]

I suggest cleaning out your Av port, might cause some invisible short

 

[BocuD]

Removing the components you cut through may also be a good idea

 

[ToddyHD]

Guys....


FINALLY A WORKING TRIM I am a very happy boy!

 

[GingerOfOz]

I found the old trim.

Jokes aside, great job! Looks like you're pretty close to finishing.

 

[AlecM7]

View attachment 8036 I found the old trim.

 

[Dominatory]

Guys....


FINALLY A WORKING TRIM I am a very happy boy!

View attachment 8035

sweet mind PMing me all the parts I need to get a working trim like that. im thinking of doing a wii portable

 

[AlecM7]

sweet mind PMing me all the parts I need to get a working trim like that. im thinking of doing a wii portable

Really all you need to get a trim booting are PTH08080 regulators. Any other kind really won't work too well (trust me I tried the cheap ones you can get off of amazon for like $5).

There's plenty of guides on BitBuilt for how to get your trim working, etc... If you haven't seen it yet, there's a category on the main page called the "Guides Hub" this has a lot of the stuff you need to get going on your portable.

 

[ToddyHD]

So everyone, boy oh boy do I have a big update (probably going to be the biggest update of my worklog) today. Making this portable has been an absolute roller coaster to say the least, but even when the Wii seems to want to give up on me it still is working! I somehow fully bricked my Wii OMGWTF trim when turning off the console when I was installing postloader from the Install File Priiloader menu. I don't fully understand how this happened entirely, since re-writing the NAND flash memory is pretty much impossible without altering the IOSes which, lets be honest, is above my knowledge and understanding of the custom software IOSes which I don't know much about just yet.

I had a working trim and I still have a working trim, except the only difference now is that the Wii will only boot in Priiloader when holding reset but will not boot up with a USB drive. I had applied Aurelio's VGA patches and they worked extremely well before I trimmed off the AV port as I was done with testing. As you can see, the Wii was beautiful and was coming close to completion.

This picture I think shows off how great VGA video looks on a 5" screen. Despite not having much soldering experience, I bought myself a really fine pencil tip and was able to solder the H-Sync/V-Sync lines to the AVE pretty easily without much issues. I had an issue where the Wii booted to the system menu on startup, but once I changed the settings in Priiloader to boot to Postloader I got image immediately.

Then we come to the horrible news. The Wii somehow got bricked and the Wii would not recognise USB. I thought it might have been my wiring since the wires weren't fully twisted together. I rewired USB about 10 times but that would not fix the issue despite a stable 5.02V in to the USB. I cried for help on the BitBuilt discord and Aurelio, the pizza man, mentioned that there could be potential damage to iOS 58 since I was black screening on postloader, HBC and any other Wii application that I tried to open although Priiloader would boot flawlessly and seamlessly when holding reset to GND.

The only option from here on in (according to Aurelio) is to rewire an SD card to dump, re-pack, install ios58 NoWifi and then somehow pack it all back together which I really am not comfortable with (since I have no experience with much software modding) so if someone could lead me in the right direction for reflashing NANDs/the next best solution to re-install IOS58 that would be good. God forbid, I had to rewire the SD card. For someone who is not really great at soldering to Wii vias, soldering to a small bunch of resistors just above the 3.3v line made me sweat a bit. At first, the SD card wouldn't work. I had used equal wire lengths of about 45mm and wired to the back test pads.

I tried shortening my wire lengths down to about 3cm each and then wired from the resistor array to the front pads on the front of the USB port. Low and behold, IT WORKS!!! I am able to access the Load/Install file menu from Priiloader and it shows the contents of the SD card file. Before, it would simply say "No FAT device detected" but now I have access to the contents of the SD drive.

Here are more pictures of the SD wiring!

Boy oh boy. This Wii does not like me but it hasn't given up just yet! I hope that re-installing NoWifi IOSes will bring it back! There is potential now at least. Stay tuned peoples.

 

[Dominatory]

So everyone, boy oh boy do I have a big update (probably going to be the biggest update of my worklog) today. Making this portable has been an absolute roller coaster to say the least, but even when the Wii seems to want to give up on me it still is working! I somehow fully bricked my Wii OMGWTF trim when turning off the console when I was installing postloader from the Install File Priiloader menu. I don't fully understand how this happened entirely, since re-writing the NAND flash memory is pretty much impossible without altering the IOSes which, lets be honest, is above my knowledge and understanding of the custom software IOSes which I don't know much about just yet.

I had a working trim and I still have a working trim, except the only difference now is that the Wii will only boot in Priiloader when holding reset but will not boot up with a USB drive. I had applied Aurelio's VGA patches and they worked extremely well before I trimmed off the AV port as I was done with testing. As you can see, the Wii was beautiful and was coming close to completion.

This picture I think shows off how great VGA video looks on a 5" screen. Despite not having much soldering experience, I bought myself a really fine pencil tip and was able to solder the H-Sync/V-Sync lines to the AVE pretty easily without much issues. I had an issue where the Wii booted to the system menu on startup, but once I changed the settings in Priiloader to boot to Postloader I got image immediately.

View attachment 8087

Then we come to the horrible news. The Wii somehow got bricked and the Wii would not recognise USB. I thought it might have been my wiring since the wires weren't fully twisted together. I rewired USB about 10 times but that would not fix the issue despite a stable 5.02V in to the USB. I cried for help on the BitBuilt discord and Aurelio, the pizza man, mentioned that there could be potential damage to iOS 58 since I was black screening on postloader, HBC and any other Wii application that I tried to open although Priiloader would boot flawlessly and seamlessly when holding reset to GND.

The only option from here on in (according to Aurelio) is to rewire an SD card to dump, re-pack, install ios58 NoWifi and then somehow pack it all back together which I really am not comfortable with (since I have no experience with much software modding) so if someone could lead me in the right direction for reflashing NANDs/the next best solution to re-install IOS58 that would be good. God forbid, I had to rewire the SD card. For someone who is not really great at soldering to Wii vias, soldering to a small bunch of resistors just above the 3.3v line made me sweat a bit. At first, the SD card wouldn't work. I had used equal wire lengths of about 45mm and wired to the back test pads.

I tried shortening my wire lengths down to about 3cm each and then wired from the resistor array to the front pads on the front of the USB port. Low and behold, IT WORKS!!! I am able to access the Load/Install file menu from Priiloader and it shows the contents of the SD card file. Before, it would simply say "No FAT device detected" but now I have access to the contents of the SD drive.

Here are more pictures of the SD wiring!

View attachment 8088

View attachment 8089

View attachment 8091

Boy oh boy. This Wii does not like me but it hasn't given up just yet! I hope that re-installing NoWifi IOSes will bring it back! There is potential now at least. Stay tuned peoples.

woah reminds me of my ps2 portable I keep having issues back to back

 

[ToddyHD]

Well today was a pretty depressing day for the project. My third Wii is not "dead' so to speak but I cannot re-install priiloader and BootMii through the letterbomb hack. Also, no matter what I try with USB wiring the console doesn't seem to want to read the USB drive. With the help of Aurelio, we flashed the NAND back to factory with the No WiFi IOSes installed and the Wii booted into the System Menu fine.

I tried the following to get the board to work but right now nothing seems to be working... really I am quite peeved off and upset. All my hard work seems to have been lost just by trimming the AV connector off which it's just really strange.

• Running the cheese installer by putting the .dol file in the root of the SD - the installer runs but cannot detect USB on either port
• Running the PortablizeMii package through letterbomb from the system menu - the letterbomb appears but when I run it, I just get a black screen
• Running the HackMii installer from the please.hackmii.com website results in lines of code, freezing at "valid elf file detected", followed by the Wii perpetually sitting there for eternity for me to look at this statement
• I tried loading MultiModManager from the letterbomb and it works, but when I try to mount the SD card to run the boot.elf file through the APPS manager, it says "cannot mount SD card" which is absolutely weird, since the Wii detects the SD and loads MMM through the SD

Looks like it's time for a 4th Wii. Shoutouts to both Aurelio and BocuD for helping me out in the discord with this Wii. I wouldn't have come this far without them.. I've definitely lost a bit of motivation to cut open another Wii but, maybe sometime in the near future.

 

[AlecM7]

This is really weird, because I've been having the exact same problem where when I go to trim the AV connector off everything gets messed up afterwards. On my first board it broke BGAs underneath the chips.

My theory is that trimming this part of the board off flexes it in a way that messes up the BGAs. I'm thinking this might be an issue with the lead-free BGAs under the chips getting older and weaker, therefore causing more issues the older the Wii boards get.

I'm kind of frustrated that removing the AV port seems to be so damaging for no reason. It'd be nice to know exactly why BS like this happens.

 

[GingerOfOz]

This is really weird, because I've been having the exact same problem where when I go to trim the AV connector off everything gets messed up afterwards. On my first board it broke BGAs underneath the chips.

My theory is that trimming this part of the board off flexes it in a way that messes up the BGAs. I'm thinking this might be an issue with the lead-free BGAs under the chips getting older and weaker, therefore causing more issues the older the Wii boards get.

I'm kind of frustrated that removing the AV port seems to be so damaging for no reason. It'd be nice to know exactly why BS like this happens.

I feel like the issue is likely somewhere else, as people have been trimming off AV ports and far closer for years now with no BGA related issues.

 

[ToddyHD]

Guys...
Wii Trim #4

We're back in business.

YEAAAAAAAAAH BOIIIIIIII