Wee Wii - Open Source Wii PCB Recreation

B_rob1

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Nov 24, 2025
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Wee Wii
Wii PCB v2.webp

Hello all, some of you may have seen me post about this in the discord a while back, but I am now finally getting around to making a post.

I have designed a full PCB recreation of the Wii motherboard with schematic, the project is open source, and the KiCad files are available on GitHub.
This board is not really very useful as a standalone portable design, it was mostly designed to verify the schematic and board functionality, it's 62.2 x 71.5 mm. It's not competing with any of the advanced trims and only really beats out the OMGWTF trim in size.

This board should be a good starting point for anyone who wants to design a fully integrated portable Wii without having to cut and relocate components on a regular board.
Do note that some of the nets are not labeled perfectly, and there may be issues that I am not aware of, I did make a functional board populated with the components from a donor board, with some bodges on an old version of the schematic. Those issues should all be resolved, and there should not be many issues left on the board besides poor labeling on some of the pads, like the sd card pads, and the gamecube card reader pads. MX chip RTC functionality has not been confirmed yet, I need to harvest another gamecube controller port to navigate the menu.

GitHub: Wee Wii

I am currently re-ordering a board with actual PCBA done, hand soldering the passives without a stencil wasn't exactly fun, but I want to ensure that I find out soon if my schematics or BOM have any problems. My old footprints were labeled for me probing each package from the top left pad, this is how my schematic was wired before converting it to the actual package labels.

You can see the old naming convention here:
1780010814917.webp

Also the initial symbols were in order measurements, the new ones sort them by type, here are some examples:
1780011464590.webp
1780011506434.webp

Also the entire GPU-CPU bus is labeled, so it is slightly easier to keep up with length ranges of the different nets.

Soldering is rough, I populated this without a stencil, some of it was with lowmelt paste, but I got tired of doing that and changed to a 1.5mm iron tip, USB was also hastily moved trying to get it to boot RVLoader. The polarity on the old design was not correct for the usb ports I was using, so I had to flip them.
This was taken Jan 31st when I got it to boot, video is in the discord from around that time.
Wii Rear Bodges.webp


I am not very active on the forum but I will try and answer questions when I see them, it would likely be fastest to reach out on discord though.
 
Congratulations on pulling this off!! Many attempted, most failed but here you are to set things right!
Can’t wait to see a fully integrated custom portable design based on this
 
Absolutely mind blowing. Thanks for sharing it!
 
Great to see you on the forums B_rob! Amazing work!
 
Really beautiful project! I remember seeing this on and off in the Discord, but I never got a good look at it. Always appreciate when people are able to open source like this! Great stuff man!
 
RoseDagger spotted two issues, the GDDR3's ZQ pin is normally grounded on the Wii, but it works on my board floating.

C160 was corrected to 100nF from 4.7uF, I will be able to find out when my new pcb order arrives if this works regardless, as I already ordered it PCBA'd with the older value. Boards have been shipped.

Changes have been pushed onto the GitHub, if anyone spots any other issues let me know.
 
That’s really awesome.Actually, I’d like to see the entire process and details of how you migrated the CPU and GPU.
 
This is great! Will chip-sets from all types of Wii revisions work?
- Allways great to get some extra usability of the early revisions that is not as portabilizable out of the box.

Very interested in seeing the process of relocating the BGA-Chips without incident - and what tools are needed for this.
Am very keen to maybe start from this and get a portable "Wii Advance" design going in the future.

Anyway, phenomenal work, keep it up!
 
This is great! Will chip-sets from all types of Wii revisions work?
- Allways great to get some extra usability of the early revisions that is not as portabilizable out of the box.

Very interested in seeing the process of relocating the BGA-Chips without incident - and what tools are needed for this.
Am very keen to maybe start from this and get a portable "Wii Advance" design going in the future.

Anyway, phenomenal work, keep it up!
Any 4 layer revision set should work. 6 layer revision chips consume +50% power and produce a ton more heat, which requires beefier voltage pours and more expensive regulators, so even if they are drop in compatible you wouldn't want to use them.

You also can't mix and match the CPU/GPU/NAND from multiple consoles. They're paired via hardware keys, so you need to extract all the BGAs from one system successfully and transplant them. All the other chips like MX and the AVE can be mixed and matched. Until recently this was a huge problem that caused something like a 90% failure rate, but B_rob found that baking the Wii in an oven at 100C for 8 hours and then immediately harvesting the chips and transplanting them makes it somewhat reliable. Without the baking, moisture in the die will flash boil into steam during transplanting, cracking the silicon and killing it.

Aside from standard tools like your iron and a hot air station, at minimum I think you need a little convection oven for drying, a PCB reflow hotplate for harvesting and transplanting, and a good stencil jig to apply solder paste. An ultrasonic cleaner would probably be useful as well.
 
This is great! Will chip-sets from all types of Wii revisions work?
- Allways great to get some extra usability of the early revisions that is not as portabilizable out of the box.

Very interested in seeing the process of relocating the BGA-Chips without incident - and what tools are needed for this.
Am very keen to maybe start from this and get a portable "Wii Advance" design going in the future.

Anyway, phenomenal work, keep it up!
The supported Wii revisions for harvesting are the smaller shrunken packages ( From CPU-40 and later revision boards ), the bga 28x28 gpu and the bga 17x17 cpu, the other packages have a larger bga grid and different pinout.
The gpu and nand are a set though, those have to be transplanted together, ideally after installing RVLoader.
I might end up making a footprint and symbol for the larger chips to test some stuff, but I am very unlikely to route them.
 
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