huge, but probably dumb, charging idea~

[CommanderBrace]

So imagine you have yourself a portable Wii with a built in GC controller. BUT, you retain the stock cable for the controller, and it plugs into the console. (This would basically be if you used a GC keyboard controller shell for the whole system). In this manner, you could plug your portable into another wii and use it as a GC controller. Let's say though, that you want to leave your controller plugged in to a wii, flip a switch on your controller, and the 5V line from the other wii is now charging your portable's cells via a charge circuit taken from the controller.
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Is this even plausible?

 

[Noah]

The controller idea is 100% plausible. Charging probably not so much reconsidering the current of the 5V line in the Wii would be too weak to charge the batteries at a usable rate.

 

[cheese]

I was pretty curious as to how long it would actually take, so I did some calculations. Based on the 0.55mm thickness of the power traces, you can pull just shy of 1A * 5v = 5W from the GC ports. The 18650s in gman's BOM are 3.7v * 3400mAh = 12.5Wh. People usually use 2 cells, so 25Wh/5W = 5h charge time. I wouldn't recommend pulling that much power from the GC ports, and your charger won't be 100% efficient, so let's just round to 6h. Not the worst, but an average cell phone charger can do 2.25A * 5v = 11.25W, cutting your charge time in half. You'd probably also want to have a switch to prevent the portable from trying to charge itself (if you were to have charging over the GC ports, which I wouldn't recommend)

 

[CommanderBrace]

I was thinking primarily of passive charging through the GC ports while I use it in tournament play~ It wasn't meant to be an efficient means of charging, but something that I *could* do if I wanted to exclude an actual port for charging on the console. If I did that, I'd make the battery pack easily accessible to be removed from the system and charged separately.

 

[cheese]

You could always go with something like this and have the whole portable powered from USB (assuming your screen can work on 5V).

 

[CommanderBrace]

You could always go with something like this and have the whole portable powered from USB (assuming your screen can work on 5V).

I ended up getting one. I'm gonna upload picks of sizing. From the looks of it, I might need to relocate these outputs, LED charge indicator, and the charger inputs.