The Return of LUMP_PUMP's G-Boy Worklog

[LUMP PUMP]

In the summer of 2020, I made my first attempt at building a G-Boy after watching Shank's video on the G-Boy earlier that year. The project ended in disaster due to my inexperience (and poor trim quality), and I never really had the time or spare income to reattempt the project until now. 4 years and 3 Wiis since I first tried to build a G-Boy, my G-Boy project is once again entering the trimming stage. Since this is gonna take a while (my dremel's battery is pretty low but not unusable), This seems like a good time to make my first post of another worklog. Here's the trim progress so far:

If you can't tell, I've tried to give the Nand lines a pretty wide berth, since that's where I messed up my last run at the project. Like last time, advice from experienced forum members is welcomed, since I'm only a hint more experienced with electronics than last time

 

[LUMP PUMP]

Finished the trim, and sanded the edges. I only used sandpaper up to 320 grit, but I tested the resistances according to the guide, and each of them were higher than the values in the spreadsheet, so I feel confident that there aren't any shorts. I attempted to relocate the U10, but I couldn't get the U10 off the original board for the life of me (my soldering iron was at 750 degrees F). Does anyone have any tips for removing the U10?

 

[Xenii]

Hi !
I personally remove U10 by putting a big blob of solder on each side. Then I heat up quickly each blob at once with my solder iron. For the solder iron, take a tip with approximately the same length as the U10. It will increase the contact between your solder iron and your blobs. For the temperature, it should be good. Be careful to not stay too much time on one blob, it could damage your U10. After a few time, you should be able to take off the U10.

You can also remove it with hot air, but when I’ve tried I broke it. It’s up to you though.

Also, Ginger made a great video about trimming a Wii. Check it out, it’s super useful:


I hope this will be useful for you. Have a great day !

 

[LUMP PUMP]

First off, thanks Zenii for posting the full trim video, it definitely helped reassure me that I wasn't gonna ruin my trim in the process of relocating the U10.

Secondly, my trim is now complete!

I did end up scuffing the board up a little bit while trying to remove the LDO, but let's hope that doesn't lead to issues later.

I'll get to soldering the board to my G-Boy case tomorrow, but in the meantime I'm gonna celebrate not completely trashing a Wii while trying to trim it.

 

[Xenii]

Good job !

 

[LUMP PUMP]

So I tried to wire my Wii up to the PMS, USB and LCD, but unfortunately it didn't boot. I have a couple theories as to why this happened. The first is that the 3.3V line could be making contact with the wire soldered to the ground pad, which I hope didn't fry the Wii. My second theory is that the U10 in malfunctioning, since I bent the input leg of the chip while taking it off of the motherboard. If anything else sticks out as a problem from the pictures, let me know.

 

[Customledmods]

It looks like your ground and 3.3v wires are swapped, also check the area circled in blue to ensure nothing is being bridged.

 

[LUMP PUMP]

Finally got the Wii to boot and output composite video! I'm pretty excited by this step, since my background is in mechanical design and includes almost no electronics (even though I had no hand in designing the PCBs lol). I'm saving the rest of the wiring for another day, since getting the usb wired was a giant pain in the neck, and I'd like to slow down and appreciate this little victory (gonna play Wind Waker on the 6 layer Wii that I bought on accident a while ago).

 

[LUMP PUMP]

I managed to get the controls working fully, but I'm having trouble soldering the Vsync and Hsync wires to the pins on the AVE-RVL. I can get one wire to stick for a little while, but as soon as I go to solder the other wire, it pops off the pin. Does anyone have any tricks for soldering to the pins of the chip?

 

[LUMP PUMP]

So I wired the VGA signals from the Wii board to the LCD driver, but I couldn't get a picture to display. (The H-Sync wire was on the pin when I did this, then it popped off. I'll resolder it later.) Does anything look glaringly wrong from these pictures?

 

[Darkside19]

The v sync cable looks bridged with the right pin next to it. You should resolder both. They can easily be bridged

 

[LUMP PUMP]

So, I decided to throw in the towel on wiring video and just wire component video, since I've already gotten that working before. I tried to wire preamp audio, but couldn't get it working and now I'm thinking of just wiring processed audio to the headphone jack, since I don't really care to use the speakers. Are any of the test pads on the back of the audio boards for processed audio signals?