Worklog My First Portable: An Ashida

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I began actually working on my Ashida back in March when I cut my (first) Wii. I've been documenting my work in my lab notebook and taking photos with my phone and (cheap) microscope.

I keep trying to tell the story of this work to my friends and family, but it's tough to explain this stuff to people outside of this community. I figured the solution is to just write out a worklog and share it if people are interested.

Before I dive in though, I want to give a huge shout-out to the members of the Discord who have provided awesome support and embody the spirit of engineering and growth. This community is awesome!

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Okay, let's get started.

I began with a black Wii I got off Goodwill. I disassembled the Wii and did the OMGWTF trim and got to work sanding. I checked resistance and everything was good. So I wired up power. Unfortunately though I couldn't get video out of it.

At this point it occurred to me that I MIGHT have left wifi on in the RVloader set up. I figured, how hard could wifi be? And assumed I'd want it.

So I tried to wire up WiFi. This got some laughs over in the discord . A noble effort, no doubt, but not going to cut it. I tried again following the guidance of the pros But I just couldn't get it to work. Given that I didn't even know if the trim was good, and with wifi being as challenging as it is, it was time to relegate this board to the "future projects" bin and move on.

I ordered a 3 pack of wiis on EBay, two of which were black, and set about starting over.

This time I was way more careful, and took it step by step. First, I wanted to confirm that the softmod had gone correctly, and that I could get video out of the wii using my janky solution. I didn't have a spare RCA cable, but I had this RJ45 to RCA adapter. I figured I could use some CAT-5 with an RJ45 connecter and get composite video from the Wii. Here it is working as I had hoped. I was now confident that this thing COULD boot. But going forward, I'd need to do some more testing before I was ready for the trim.

 

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Next up, relocate U10, remove the Wifi and Bluetooth modules, and prove that the system will boot.

On the discord, it was suggested that Wireless U10 is the way to go. The big advantage is that, once it's in place, there's no wire you could accidentally pull off while doing the trim. I really like this as a solution. It's slightly more challenging, but way more reliable.

First, I scratched a small bit of the solder mask off to expose a ground point. Then I soldered the two legs of the U10 to the 3.3v and the appropriate GPU pin via. Then a nice blob of solder on the 3 pins on the other side and the scratched off ground point. Next I removed the Wifi and Bluetooth cards and powered the whole thing up. Happily, everything worked. So this time, I was ready to do the trim and confident that, if it didn't boot after the trim, the fault would be the trim.

I taped up to do the second trim and got a nice cut. I was a bit worried about the "Nike Shoosh", but it turns out I should have been WAY more concerned about the close cut on the NAND. I completely removed the C135 capacitor and the ground and 3.3v lines which feed the NAND. In the Discord, Y2K offered me the image in the bottom right corner showing how I could restore the appropriate wires to the NAND. I made an attempt, but I ended up bridging some of the pins, and getting frustrated. Because I had one more Wii in my stock, I put this one into the "future projects" bin, and started over again with the last of my 4 Layer Wiis. (Little did I know, I'd return to this board in the future and it would end up being the one that I'd use in the final build. But more on that later.)

"Third time's a charm," as they say. Fortunately, each time I started over I was able to apply the learnings from the last time. As a result, the third trim went really well. I did the wireless U10, and tested everything out. The result, a working, trimmed Wii, connected to my TV via composite video:

I live in a hot desert climate, and I was finishing this work in May. My lab/workshop is in my garage and isn't air conditioned. This meant that my season was officially over, and that I'd have to wait out the hot weather before I'd be able to take the next steps on the project. But I felt good about what I'd learned so far. In addition, there were rumors that the RVL-DD was finally going to become generally available. One HUGE advantage of the RVL-DD over other video options is that it can render the aspect ratio of GC games correctly. I'm a big snob when it comes to aspect ratios and have no interest in playing stretched games. The combination of the weather, and the opportunity to use the DD, put the project on hold for several months. When the RVL-DD was made available, I bought the rest of the boards that I needed from 4LayerTech, and patiently waited for the cool of the fall.