Question Wii not booting

Joined
May 16, 2022
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I have trimmed my Wii and wired up a RVL-PMS lite, and a RVL-PD 2 (rev b) to it. as far as I can tell I have wired everything correctly, however the Wii does not boot. I have checked multiple times and it seems like everything is wired correctly, so if there are any troubleshooting tips anyone can give, that would be greatly appreciated!

I have attached some pictures of the wii, however i dont know how helpful they will be because the wiring is a bit messy.
 

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Joined
Jun 17, 2022
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I don't have any experience with wii portables (I am waiting on parts for my first), but I have a decent amount of experience with other electronics projects and I can see a couple issues here. The first one is that you really really need to clean up your work better. The 3rd picture shows a solder blob on one of the chips in a very obvious location where it would easily be knocked off. You need to clean your soldering work thoroughly to make sure you don't leave any solder balls around on your work, because they can easily short something out and depending on what they short even kill some components. To clean this kind of stuff you should pour some isopropy alcohol on it (90% or higher is preferable because it will evaporate faster, but any concentration will work as long as you give it ample time to dry afterwards, and the lower the concentration the more time it will take to dry) and then lightly scrub it with a toothbrush. There shouldn't be any risk of damaging your solder joints this way if they are done properly as long as you didn't try to solder a wire that is way too big to a tiny delicate trace or via. Your soldering could also really use some work. You have exposed way too much copper on all of the wires delivering power, all that excess is just asking for trouble because it can easily short against something, and when you have excess copper exposed it is easy to end up with stray strands that are even worse and can short even more easily, and several loose strands are visible in the first and 2nd picture. Your technique with the actual soldering could also use some improvement. When you solder with an appropriate amount of heat and flux the surface tension of the solder will always leave a very smooth, curved surface, which will be extremely shiny with leaded solder or matte with unleaded solder (It is best practice not to mix leaded and unleaded on anything you are planning to leave long term, and the wii would be using unleaded). Solder joints with spikes or uneven surfaces indicate that you didn't use enough heat or needed to use more flux, or both. When you don't use enough heat and flux the solder joints will be weak physically and don't make good electrical connections, which can introduce all kinds of issues that can be very difficult to troubleshoot. I would recommend you review some basic soldering techniques, the electronics 101 videos thread on this forum has some examples, and then practice on some junk electronics like the pcb scraps you trimmed off of your wii motherboar or any random broken electronics you can find until you can consistently produce nice smooth solder joints and don't have more than a milimeter or two of wire sticking out past the solder joints then come back and rework this because trying to do a project with as many wires needed as a wii portable without being able to consistently avoid cold solder joints is asking for trouble because there will be so many potentially bad solder joints you will need to check and it is very easy to get intermittent connectivity with cold solder joints.
 
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