Worklog Luiigi's Portable Mansion (First Wii Portable)

[Corrine]

I've been a little active on Discord but have been waiting to start my worklog until after I was done modeling my case. This also isn't something I'm doing solo, my stepdad is helping me a lot with the electronics portion and 3D printing as I have zero knowledge of any of that but I designed my own case and secured all the parts on my own. I'm hoping to have this done by Halloween because I definitely know I'm going to drop everything when Luigi's Mansion 3 comes out.

Features:

• Luigi's Mansion themed case, of course. This will probably be done using a combination of vinyl and/or spray paint (the design isn't fully pictured below). I may get into changing the theme for the PortablizeMii menu to match, not sure yet.
  
• Original Gamecube buttons, including LR triggers. These are a smoke gray to compliment the black and green theme. I'm a little torn on installing LEDs inside the buttons or not, I feel like it'd be cool but distracting so it'll probably be an idea I'll scrap.
  
• Original Switch power and volume buttons
  
• G-Man's PMS
• G-Man's USB-C custom PCB for charging and transferring data to the USB drive (if there's a better, more technical way to phrase that, I'm open to suggestions). G-Man hooked me up with this since it’s the PCB that was in the BB-Wii at MGC but he said he's going to start selling it in the BitBuilt store soon.
  
• GC+
• JacksonS's audio amp
• Aurelio's VGA patches for the onboard screen

Spoiler: Case Design

 

[DeoNaught]

This looks really cool 0'w'0

• Original Gamecube buttons, including LR triggers. These are a smoke gray to compliment the black and green theme. I'm a little torn on installing LEDs inside the buttons or not, I feel like it'd be cool but distracting so it'll probably be an idea I'll scrap.

Imo don't go for lit buttons, I think it would detract from your theme I'd think.

And I have a suggestion, with this part, circled in red.

Try using the fillet tool, where the bump and case itself meets, it might make it look better, smoother anyways. writing this it might not make too much sense, but this was the best phrasing I could get. It may or may not look better.

Also are you using a 5 inch screen or a 4.3 inch screen I can't tell :X

Even if you don't it'd still probably look good :3

 

[Corrine]

It’s actually filleted right there! But it’s convex and I think you’re describing concave. I’m not sure if I’ll change it, it feels very ergonomic in the hands, surprisingly.

It’s also a 5” screen, one of the ones from the BOM.

ETA: I just tried to fillet it concave along that edge just to see how it'd look but Fusion errored out on me. I think it's because of how it curls up on itself a bit where the red arrow is.

 

[Corrine]

Test printing V2 of the case tonight, which is the design shown above. I printed V1 about a month ago and it was... rough. I took Jeff’s advice and modeled supports and really took my time with the design the second time around. Also huge shoutout to G-Man for making the G-Wii cad files open source, I may have liberally borrowed inspiration for the supports from there. Because of how well I was able to model it the second time, there’s only a couple measurements I need to tweak for the final print, which is awesome.

Spoiler: V1 and V2 case prints

 

[fibbef]

Case is looking good! This should come together nicely.

As I have discovered in my own project, fillets can get weird when you're trying to do multiple edges back to back. Sometimes you have to rethink the order. Other times you just gotta go with what works.

If you wanted to do a concave fillet like Deo was suggesting, I think in order to make that work you'd have to make that fillet before doing the fillet along the main body. Then once you did that, Fusion would treat the edge around the main body and the edge around the button as a single edge, so you could fillet the whole thing in one fell swoop.

Downside to that is that you wouldn't be able to fillet them to different degrees. For instance, looks like you have maybe a 1mm fillet on the button but 2mm on the body. Doing it this way would make it all the same.

 

[jefflongo]

That's a huge improvement! I look forward to seeing how it turns out in the end!

 

[Corrine]

Made some progress this weekend but more like one step forward, a half step back. I got the PMS and usb c board wired together but I’m only getting a 5V reading on the usb c board no matter what charger I use. I’ve tried an anker pd (5V/9V/12V), a Switch charger (5V/15V), and a different usb c charger (5V/9V) and they’re all outputting 5V with the exception of the Switch charger outputting 15V when the usb c board isn’t wired to the PMS.

It charges the batteries but you all know it’s optimal to charge the batteries at 12V rather than 5V.

 

[DeoNaught]

I can't say, but it might help to clean your board, SDA and SDL looks like they are shorted.

it sounds like your Usb c PD might be bugged somehow?

 

[Gman]

I can't say, but it might help to clean your board, SDA and SDL looks like they are shorted.

it sounds like your Usb c PD might be bugged somehow?

I believe the issue is the USB cable is not PD compatible.

 

[Corrine]

I can't say, but it might help to clean your board, SDA and SDL looks like they are shorted.

it sounds like your Usb c PD might be bugged somehow?

Resoldering/cleaning up all the joints on the usb c and PMS didn’t help. I originally was just using a usb c cable I found around the house but after buying the anker pd charger and cable combo, it still wouldn’t recognize a voltage above 5V (besides 15V from the Switch cord but it stepped it down to 5V through the PMS anyways).

 

[Aurelio]

Which Anker supply are you using? The PD handshanke requests not only the voltage, but the current as well. If the Anker doesn't support that current requested by the STUSB4500 (the IC that handles PD on that USB C board), then it won't complete the handshake

 

[Corrine]

Which Anker supply are you using?

This one, the outputs for the usb c port are rated at 5V/3A and 9V/2A. Should I try one of the chargers that has a 9V/3A output instead?

 

[Aurelio]

This one, the outputs for the usb c port are rated at 5V/3A and 9V/2A. Should I try one of the chargers that has a 9V/3A output instead?

The code configures either 12V 2A or 9V 3A, so you should try another one, yes

 

[jefflongo]

If you have a means to flash the PMS firmware you could change it to support 9V 2A instead if you really wanted to