Worklog Louii AKA the "MonogatarWii"

[cy]

I've decided it's finally time for me to build another Wii. I've had the idea to build a Louii based on Monogatari artwork for quite some time now, I even purchased the colors of paint I'd need to paint the design into the back of it. But it wasn't until recently that I decided to get this thing together. For starters, here's the artwork I decided I wanted in the back of this unit:

Initially I thought this would be too difficult to 3d print into the back of the shell. So I settled on trying to paint this into the back of the unit with spray paint. @That_Random_Guy was nice enough to vinyl cut some stencils for me, and 2 to 3 years later, I finally decided to get up off my lazy butt and get to work on this.

Surprisingly, the paint I purchased 2 to 3 years ago was still good! I did a bit of testing on a cardboard box I had lying around, and it yielded some very encouraging results! So I went straight to the case I had printed back then, and here were my results with the first stencil:

I ended up overdoing it with a few too many coats of paint, and the stencil started lifting causing paint to go under it. This was a big learning experience for me since I'd never really attempted something like this before. Next time I'll be sure to go with fewer coats of paint, and a bit less primer. I also question if the print's textured finish made this any more difficult than it needed to be.

These results aren't really too bad though. I believe they could realistically be salvaged with enough IPA and fiddling around. This was however 2 to 3 years after I originally came up with the idea for this project. Over the course of this time frame, I've gotten my hands on many different colors of printer filament. Initially, I knew 3d printing this design would be very challenging seeing how it has 8 different colors (not including the color of the shell itself) and has many fine details that could prove to be a huge challenge to print especially with a 0.4mm nozzle. I decided to give it a go anyways though since I already had over half the colors of filament I needed to make this happen. It'll lead to better more durable results than paint would anyways.

So I took the artwork, ran it through Waifu2x to remove the JPEG artifacts, and then proceeded to use Wesk's method of turning each color of the artwork into a vector with inkscape. I imported it into my 3d modeling software, spent a few hours connecting the seams to each other, placed it on the back of the console, created a negative of the artwork, and exported everything. From there, I lined everything up in Prusa Slicer, and patiently waited for my printer to print each of the 8 colors. After telling my printer to print the rest of the shell with the negative for the artwork, and going to bed, I woke up to this:

View attachment artwork back.webp

This is by no means perfect, but by golly it's good! For a first try I'll gladly take results like these! Here's what the rest of the case is looking like from the outside:

Something else I went ahead and did was replace the fan intake holes with stars. The blue starry filament, and the stars being the fan intake is a Monogatari reference. Anyways, after getting a few loose parts I needed, I had to sand down the opening for the L button, and I then proceeded to install the USB-C PD board. After doing this, I found the power button I had inserted wasn't fitting the way it was supposed to. It was keeping the power button depressed at all times kind of like me, we obviously can't have this in a portable though. So I went to unscrew the PD board, and then this happened:

If you look closely at the screw driver in the first photo, you can see the head of the screw broke off. What you're looking at in the second picture is the screw post that I ripped out with pliers afterwards since of course the screw snapped flush with the screw post. I went ahead and printed another screw post for this, and I've gone ahead and super glued it into the case. The glue is currently drying, and here's how that looks:

I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if it's glued well enough. Once I'm sure it won't be coming loose, I'll resume assembly. It's frustrating to be hung up on a build this early in because of something dumb. I am grateful to at least have a solution that isn't ordering or 3d printing a brand new shell though. I'd really suck if I had to completely redo this over something stupid like Chinese screws screwing me over. Honestly, screw that!

I'm looking forward to getting this project assembled though. In 2020 I dm'd Ginger about possibly building me a Louii, and after hearing the price tag, I opted to build a G-Boy instead. My desire to own a Louii hasn't gone away since then however, so I'm very excited to build and play my own 4+ years later!

 

[cy]

This isn't much of an update, but I may as well give this update since this will be the last one for a few weeks:

My repair worked and it screwed in without any problems. I had to manually shave down the screw post with a dremel since the geometry I copied was supposed to be printed inside the case, and this obviously had to be glued to the inside rather than be printed into it. I did also have to trim the power button a fair bit to ensure it'd fit without depressing the button.

With that said, I finally completed the trivial task of screwing in the first board. It was a long road to get here, but I finally overcame adversity and made it!

Joking aside, the PMS2 went a lot smoother when I screwed it in:

Progress on this has been slower than dial up internet, and it's about to get a lot slower since the controller PCBs I ordered are 1.6mm in thickness when they should be 0.8mm. This causes a clearance issue when attempting to close the unit:

It's hard to make out, but you can kind of see the GC+2.0 physically touching the battery. The case itself isn't closing either, so this is obviously an issue. I wish I would've paid closer attention when ordering up the custom boards for this build seeing how Ginger's release thread clearly says to order the PCBs at 0.8mm thickness, but I guess that's water under the bridge.

I'm a cheap skate, so I got the cheapest shipping possible from JLC when ordering the new set of boards. As a result, they probably won't be here for like 20 days. This setback is a bit of a bummer, but I'm not in any rush to get this project together considering I have other projects I want to work on, and I've got plenty of time until MGC.

Some more progress I will share however is with one of the triggers:

This trigger fit well and feels great when pressed! I needed to physically sand the opening for the left trigger a bit due to some minor warping that this shell has. It's not a big enough issue to warrant printing a new shell, but it did make fitting the other trigger a bit of a pain. Anyways, I'm gonna go ahead and leave this project here until the new PCBs arrive. Maybe I'll mess around a bit with undervolting the Wii for this in the meantime...

 

[cy]

So the original set of PCBs I ordered ended up never arriving thanks so the US postal service sending them to the same three cities for a month and then sending them back to JLC for some reason... No clue what in the world their problem is, the PCBs were literally in my state for a solid month and then they just sent them back. Luckily, they got it right the second time and I'm in business with a proper set of boards now. There was another item I had ordered from the northern part of my state that something similar happened to, I definitely think something funny is going on with my the US postal service in my state. Anyways...

As the following pics show, I was able to mount the new PCBs and I now have clearance to close the case with them and the batteries installed:

It's difficult to show it all at once, but you can see the joystick sticking out in the first image so hopefully that shows that these are mounting properly and have clearance now.

Before I decided to mount them, obviously populating them was important (and yes, I did verify that they had clearance after populating them):

After populating the boards, I struggled with the joystick ribbon cable for a solid 5 minutes before realizing I needed to connect it to the PCBs before installing it. It was then that I realized the shorting potential that the back of the joysticks have with the uncovered vias on the back of the PCBs:

So I went ahead and covered everything except the speaker contacts on both boards in hopes that I would avoid any potential shorting issues seeing how the back of the joystick does appear to be made of some sort of metal.

With this I installed the Z button, it's tact switch, and I also installed the screen mounting bracket which I printed in the most masculine color known to man:

And I added in some nice speaker meshes I got from a fabric store a few years back. I find that they do a really nice job covering the otherwise reflective speakers making the unit look better and hopefully keeping crud from entering the speakers over time. It isn't very easy to make out with these pictures, but it looks great in person:

With all of this, just about everything in the front of the unit is mounted. I still have the U-Amp to mount, but I'd say I'm pretty darn happy with this quick little session I had today. Here are pictures of how it looks on the inside and on the outside:

Something I forgot to mention is that I did go ahead and super glue the buttons to the tact switches. Doing so prevents the buttons from rotating freely seeing how there was still a bit of room for them to rotate a little.

Today I wasn't even planning on doing anything on this project, but I like getting stuff done in short bursts to keep things moving. I'm still planning on finishing this build up before MGC, but I'm not certain this will end up happening seeing how I also have a few other things I'm working on that I want done before then.

 

[cy]

Progress on this build has been real slow since I've been balancing relaxing and enjoying my time off with other projects (including this one). With that said, I think I still have time to get this done before MGC if I keep making steady progress on it. Last night I got the batteries wired up and connected:

I'm also real happy with how the wiring between the PMS and PMS PD board turned out. I had to do a bit of fine tuning to the L & R triggers since one edge of my case turned out a bit warped, but I'm happy with how it's looking overall.

Today I installed the U-Amp, soldered the GC+ connections, and wired the two halves of the control boards together:

You might notice I used a larger gauge of wire for 3v and GND on the GC+. Aurelio was telling me that it's a good idea to use thicker wires for those to avoid instability issues that he's run into, so that's why the power wires are a larger gauge. Otherwise, everything else was just magnet wired for now.

I've decided I'm going do as much wiring as possible before I connect to two halves and install the Wii. Doing so should make everything easier.

One last thing I'll point out here is how I connected the IR sensor. This driver board was originally available with a remote control that allows you to change the screen controls. The IR sensor was originally on the screen control board, but I removed it and put it on this board making sure to follow the connections accordingly. Conveniently, all the connections are in line with the legs of the IR sensor, so it doesn't even need any wires!

I did something similar to this in my Ashida, and believe it or not, I can actually use the remote to adjust the screen controls through the shell. Seeing how this portable has a translucent shell, I'm expecting I'll have even better results here! Just thought I'd point this out!

 

[cy]

Annnnnd it's done! No, like actually! This past week I've been actively working to get this portable finished up. I started by doing exactly what I said I was gonna do. I connected the various voltage and ground wires between the two halves until there was nothing left to connect. The only picture I have of this has a bunch of stray voltage wires that I had prepared for testing my Wii trim, so please ignore those:

With everything connected and functional up to this point, it was time to introduce the Wii. It's always important to get all the basic stuff working the best you can before you introduce the console's motherboard. In most builds, the PMS lies under the mobo, so it's important to have any soldering that needs to happen under the mobo done before the mobo gets introduced. Doing all of these helps to ensure that assembly will go as smoothly as possible and makes any troubleshooting infinitely easier.

After giving it all a great deal of thought, I decided it was time. I connected the voltage wires to the mobo, wired up composite video, connected the U10 wire, and gave her a whirl:

I forgot how satisfying it was to see an untested Wii trim boot and work! This is always a great sign since troubleshooting a trim that doesn't work can be both very time consuming and disheartening.

Now that the trim was working, it was time to shorten the voltage wires and start making some data connections. I started by installing the thermistor PCB and connecting it to the PMS. After that, I wired up USB and then proceeded to procrastinate connecting the PMS SCW and SDW connections:

After tidying a few things up, I finally got to work connecting the PMS data wires, and I went ahead and wired up the GC+ data line. I decided to shield the GC+ data line with GND since I've had issues with it running into interference and not working properly in past builds. I also connected reset, volume + and - since I knew I'd need to connect these at some point:

Things were getting a little messy, but I figured I'd worry about this once all the magnet wire was connected since I wanted to run all these wires a certain way. Before I knew it, I found myself wiring up audio and not taking any pictures of it. I also connected the Headphone sense (HPS) line to the Wii since Ginger said so. On a similar note, I also grounded the U-Amp specifically with GND from the PMS2 again, because Ginger says to in his Louii Twoii thread.

Things were really starting to come along at this point! Everything above that I mentioned wiring up was working! It wasn't until I tested the controls that I ran into my first issue for this build. I don't have a picture of it, but the dual tact switch I wired up for the L button was defective! The switch itself looked fine, it had a louder than usual click, but otherwise appeared to be fine until I tested it. For some reason, it didn't register the button was pressed down all the way even though it was wired up. The first troubleshooting step I took was to verify my wiring was correct. Sure enough, it was, the wires were still connected too, so I know nothing broke loose. So I swapped the dual tact switch out with a replacement making sure to keep the exact same wiring, and doing that fixed my issue. I measured the faulty tact switch with Mr. Multimeter to ensure I wasn't crazy, and Mr. Multimeter was kind enough to verify that the tact button was indeed faulty.

Unfortunately doing this forced me to lift the mobo up for a bit since the tact switch rests under it. This is always something you want to avoid doing if you can, but unfortunately, I was given a shitty dual tact switch. Skent (AKA Electron Shepherd) strikes again!

After going through that minor nightmare, I put some thermal paste on the copper cooling plate since I forgot to when I first mounted the mobo . After that, all I really had left was VGA. The H and V sync lines for VGA went about as well as they could have:

This is thanks to the Chip Quik SMD291 flux I use. YveltalGriffin recommended it to me and I can see why! It made soldering to the AVE super easy! After connecting H & V sync, I soldered mode to 3.3v, and I shielded the Red line with GND. Before shielding and connecting Green and Blue, I wanted to verify that VGA was indeed working. So I disconnected composite, connected power to the unit, turned it on, and switched the video mode from AV to VGA using the IR sensor and the remote. The results came back positive! I now had a very clean but only red video signal! So I shielded and connected the Green & Blue lines, and VGA was working perfectly!

As this point, the portable is finished! I did a bit of cable management (which I think turned out nicely):

And before long, I closed the unit up!

I'll showcase this unit properly with some games in a proper showoff thread. But the build is done and everything seems to be working! I was a bit worried that I'd have some thermal problems with my less than ideal fan intake, but I'm happy to report that the highest this console has gone up to is 49° C which is cooler than I remember my Ashida running. This was at least an hour into testing, so I'm sure it'll be fine!

I'd like to thank @GingerOfOz for designing such a cool build, answering questions I had in DMs, and for being the #2 Waluigi fan since Doom was and still is #1 in my heart. I'd also like to thank the 4 layer tech crew for their documents, circuit boards, and for maintaining an amazing community as always!