L-Wii

[Luca]

The L-Wii
Hey everyone!

This is my contest entry, the L-Wii. It's using Jackson's bt replacement project, an RVL-PMS, u-amp and direct lcd driver on one custom PCB. It will require an omega trim and custom flex PCBs...

Note: the layout of some components have changed already since making these printscreens…

Goal
The goal for this project is to make the first wiip that uses joycons. Since joycons are so slim, the body housing all of the components and screen have to be about as slim as the joycons themselves. The 7" display will be stripped down and its driver will be integrated onto the single custom PCB, the battery will be a Li-Ion flat cell and the Wii will be cooled with low-profile heatpipes.

I would have preferred stereo front-facing speakers, but, as the display takes up any space for a front-firing speaker, the speakers are placed in a top-firing position.

Cooling solution:
I'm sticking a copper plate onto the GPU and CPU. That plate will be bonded to two 80mm heatpipes that will be bonded to a roughly 27x13x10 heatsink using thermal epoxy. Blowing the hot air out of the unit are one 20x20x5mm and one 17x17x3mm fan running at 5 or 3.3v. I will be testing this solution well before I use it in the final unit, don't worry…

Battery:
I want reasonable battery life even in such a thin unit, so I'm using a 80x100x10 li-ion battery, managed by the PMS.

Omega with relocated AVE:

ew, ave...

ew, composite...

boot!

Ports:
Micro sd: connected to internal kingston adapter
SD: full-sized sd connected to the Wii's dedicated sd slot
3.5mm jack: COURAGE
USB-C: for charging/ potentially usb access
USB: Still have to decide if I want to go for internal or internal USB port w/ muxing
RTC battery: replaceable CR2032 battery for MX chip RTC

Custom PCB (not final):

The orange flex PCBs will connect any needed data signals to the PCB.

(I am aware the EPS32 needs to have space for its "Antenna Area" so it can transmit properly, that will be addressed in the final revision.)

2020 Wii portable checklist:
USB-C: ✓
Switch joysticks: ✓ (duh)
Direct lcd drive: ✓
U-amp: ✓
SD card port: ✓?

That's all I have to share right now, but I want to make a lot of progress during the coming weeks…

 

[Shank]

Very ambitious. Looks awesome so far! Really excited to see this project come to life

 

[fibbef]

Hammer at the ready for the impending rage quit. Smart thinking!

Excellent work so far! I saw Omega trim and immediately thought "I'll believe it when I see it on a screen." Kept scrolling and there it was.

 

[Luca]

Hammer at the ready for the impending rage quit. Smart thinking!

So you guys don't remove the nand with a hammer? Been doing it wrong all this time..

And get ready for more updates...

 

[Luca]

Unfortunately I have had zero time to work on this since the last update, no lurking either… But from the projects that I have seen, they all look awesome. The new site update looks great too (and Bbloader!!) But damn the prizes for this year look even better, make me want to rush together this thing before the deadline..

And LTT is making a wiip?? I wonder how that's going to effect things…

I really want to start with this again, so expect to see some updates on this soon…..

 

[Luca]

Alright, update time.

Wiimmfi on BBLoader
There's no reason for having WiFi in a portable without going online with it. Yesterday I tested out USB Loader GX on BBL for the first time using a wiimmfi patched version of MKWii. Turns out BBL doesn't use cios 249, so I got it to launch with default settings even. I don't remember it being this easy in PM... Here's how to do it (you'll have to have WiFi and BT relocated for this, so proceed with caution):

1. Patch your .wbfs with Wiim's ISO Patcher
2. Follow the folder structure of USBL GX for the patched game
3. Install d2x cIOS 249
4. Launch USBL GX and change private server to wiimmfi.de
5. Launch your patched game and you're online!

Note: This does not work with VGA. I don't see a reason this not working for patched isos of Project M or Animal Crossing or whatever.

Thermals
The cooling setup I proposed in April seemed insufficient compared to the 35x7mm cooling setups that are the norm now, but the less heatsink I use, the larger battery/PCB I can fit. The idea is to use 3 of these "Mighty Mini" fans that are 8x8x3mm and still have respectable noise levels. I've tested several low volume options now, and this seems the most feasable so far:

Heatsink compared to the rest:

So this is what I've tested: an omega mounted onto a jig, a 0.5mm copper plate over the GPU and CPU, two heatpipes attatched to the plate and the 24x13x8.6mm heatsink with just thermal paste for now:

The fan behind the heatsink was set to match the flow rate of the 3 3x8mm fans (roughly). I set it to run a game and measured the temperature of the piece of blue tape with an IR thermometer since I couldn't think of a better way to measure it. The fins of the heatsink should be rotated 90°, but I forgot.

After 30 mins, the temperature pretty much plateaued at 42C. After 2 hours, I turned off the fan and it went up to 60C. I turned the fan back on again and it went back to 42C and stayed like that for a few hours. My phone's snapdragon 810 gets hotter when watching Youtube , so I think this should be fine :p

The vents wil be at the bottom, so these fans should also cool the PMS on the PCB.

CAD Changes
One of the main things I changed from last update is the screen size. 7" to 6.2" Unfortunately you're giving up IPS and thinner bezels, but the 7" is just a tiny bit too large, even if you remove its metal shield etc. So 6.2" it is:

These are the new ports, USB-C has been moved to the top instead of the bottom.

On/off btn, micro sd, 3.5mm jack, usb-c

Then, for the dock, there's going to be 90° pogo pin receptacles on the bottom of the unit, kinda like these:

When the unit is unserted into the dock, the dock will have a portrusion that activtes a switch inside the unit that makes sure the unit is actually making contact with the dock. But this is far into the future at this point.

Now, there's just a bunch of CAD left to do, I'll test the battery life soon. If you see anything I've messed up, post it here. Maybe Gman knows if 42C is high for a Wii, I know you have a FLIR or something. If there's a place where I can get a 1090100 battery that doesn't require a minimum order of 3 bazillion, who knows, maybe I could fit it all in. First I have to clean up the schematic since it's become a fucking mess..

Till next time

 

[Luca]

yo can this be moved to the wii section

 

[Luca]

Another small update, received a replacement switch digitizer which includes the switch glass on the front. People have said it scratches easily but this unit won't be docked, so it shouldn't happen? We'll see..

I was worried it wouldn't fit the screen, but looks like it fits perfectly and no part of the screen is obstructed:

The digitizer has three cutouts, two of those will hopefully be used as speaker holes for front-firing speakers. In order for these speakers to fit, there needs to be 10mm of space, which means the plastic bracket of the LCD unit will need to be trimmed slightly, should be no problem.. The other circular cutout will be for a PMS status LED

The cells I found before were going to be too thick to keep the entire unit under ~14mm (thickness of joycons), so I found thinner cells. With the glass, screen and cells, there would be ~1mm left for walls. This should be enough, but if not, I can always remove the glass or make it 14.5mm or something.

Then here are the joycon rails, normally these would be screwed into the switch metal frame, but I only have 3d printed plastic, so on this unit the rails will be screwed into self-locking nuts, as shown here:

 

[thedrew]

What batteries did you end up going with?

 

[Luca]

What batteries did you end up going with?

Well, they needed to be ~100mm in length and less than 10mm in height so I could exactly replicate the dimensions of the Switch body. The only other size I could find was 3mm, so I ordered two of those, making the height 6mm. Aliexpress sellers claim 5000Mah.. or 6000.. or 4000 depending on where you look... God knows what it actually is, but I'll test them soon. Just look up "battery 30100100" or "3010090" or "3010080"

 

[BocuD]

Damn i don’t know how i only just found out about all your progress, this project it looking very legit
You’ll need to test those batteries to be sure, but 4000mah in that form factor is not that unrealistic, so it may be fine.

 

[Luca]

Damn i don’t know how i only just found out about all your progress, this project it looking very legit
You’ll need to test those batteries to be sure, but 4000mah in that form factor is not that unrealistic, so it may be fine.

Thanks I'm really not expecting much from the battery life for this one since the battery's so thin. Gonna try and set up a test tonight, what game do people use to test battery life? I'm thinking of using the MKWii title screen..

 

[sandman7793]

Here's 2mm and it has some pretty significant flex. I assume 1mm is going to flex like crazy. (Sorry for the greasy hands) the very edge is 1mm where the screen goes. This one is 7 inch lcd as well.

 

[Pablo]

Yeah, I don't see 1mm being enough tbh, might have to up it to 2mm in parts. It might be alright if it were CNCd aluminum but that's not the easiest thing to make...

 

[Luca]

Finished the mechanical parts of the unit, it's designed to only need one type of 6mm screw. Everything that I wanted to fit fits now and it's surprisingly still just as thick as the joycons (14mm)!

Switch lens mounted:

Back plate is mounted with five 6mm screws:

I was concerned that 1mm wasn't enough for the back and frontplate, but this thing is pretty sturdy..

Still needs some finetuning, but:

Aand noods: (rails mounted on the sides, (stripped down) screen underneath, speakers front-firing, second assembly that holds battery and screen in place. The 5 screws are driven into m2 nuts in all corners)

Almost done with the IO part of the PCB, so I'm ordering that when it's done. I'm designing the PCB in chuncks, don't want to waste any money by ordering the entire PCB and realising I shorted VSYS with GND or something........... lol

 

[sandman7793]

Oh man, it's looking sexy asf.

 

[A_s6]

first time i saw the pic i thought you just took a picture of a switch but then i looked closer. looks amazing

 

[BocuD]

That looks so damn good, like A_s6 said pretty much stock lol
And damn theres like this tiny amount of space left for the Wii and stuff? This is gonna be super interesting to see internals of when its assembled, given how much space that is ayy
How thin is the actual panel you are using?

 

[Luca]

first time i saw the pic i thought you just took a picture of a switch but then i looked closer. looks amazing

That looks so damn good, like A_s6 said pretty much stock lol

Thanks guys

And damn theres like this tiny amount of space left for the Wii and stuff? This is gonna be super interesting to see internals of when its assembled, given how much space that is ayy
How thin is the actual panel you are using?

You're completely right, that has been the hardest part about this project. I couldn't make it any thicker than 14mm since the Switch is 14mm which is pretty hard (18650 lipo is 18mm). That meant I had to find the thinnest battery that had a reasonable capacity, so I finally found a 6.5mm cell. The front glass also is 1.50mm off the budget. The only 6.2" panel available is 5mm which would be too tall, so I had to remove its metal frame:



Now it's 4mm tall, and after adding any support walls and any tolerances, it ended up around 14mm.

I roughly arranged all the components on the PCB onto the space I have left now and everything should fit, but we'll see..

 

[Luca]

All right, I'm probably spamming this thread too much but here goes:

I modeled part of the PCB, the IO board in kicad. The idea is that it slots in besides the cooler assembly and hopefully not get too hot...

Don't think I could've made the left and right spots any denser:

Needs some polish after I arranged shit but here's one side, the test pads are temporary:

Kinda rough, but you get the idea:

What it should kinda look like on the outside:

I'm probably going to have to find some SMD tact switches to replace the through-hole tacts since they kind of poke through everything lol

If I haven't made any stupid errors, I should be ordering the PCB and BOM tomorrow! Then I'll probably put together a crude prototype to feel what it's like to play this thing