Solved Sensor Bars for Portables

[Doom]

Right so I've been reading about Sensor Bars and how you can hack it because it's just a couple of IR LEDs to have a reference for the Wiimote to point at, all that I think I can figure out but where should I connect it to the trimmed Wii? Looked at some builds and the trimming guide but didn't see anything about this in particular, unless I'm not understanding this at all.

edit: I did see some for sale that mentioned usb, should I just get that one and plug it into the other port?

 

[Aurelio]

You just need to turn them on. I connected them to 5V using the proper resistor in order to have the right current

 

[Doom]

oh cool that's easy enough. For some reason I was thinking I had to trace back the sensor bar plug or something.

 

[Shank]

I recommend just getting 2 IR LEDs and running them off of the 3.3v line.

There are actually at least 2 versions of the Wii sensor bar. The older ones (usually grey shell) has more LEDs, and I couldn't get it to work off of 5v. The newer ones (usually black shell) have fewer LEDs, and will supposedly work off of 5v. I've never tried the new ones however.

IR LEDs do emit a tiny bit of visible light in the red spectrum. You can block this by using a visible light filter like the one on the sensor bar. Or my personal favorite, use the disk from a floppy disk!