Wii portable buttons

[Sethamphetamine]

Hello, im making it my life mission to put a wii inside of a wii u gamepad. I have no moneys. This is why ive spent all these years planning, not building. One hurdle im yet to overcome is buttons. The buttons and sticks on the gamepad feel great but they use the wii u motherboard to function. Obviosly, that wont work here. What should i do to make the buttons (and sticks) on this thing work on my wii portable (if this is stupid and obvious, dont judge me please. Im very new)

 

[Mr Game & Cube]

connecting the buttons and triggers to ground presses the button, so you should be good to just wire that up. for the sticks, you would need to get a pinout for the stick boxes, then wire them to the GC+ accordingly.

 

[Stitches]

The buttons in the Wii U gamepad run to a carbon trace FFC. You can't solder to carbon traces directly like you can with copper traces, but you can use an FFC breakout board of the correct pitch and then solder wires between the breakout board and the GC+

 

[Mr Game & Cube]

sorry, that's what I meant to say but it came out kinda wrong

 

[Sethamphetamine]

The buttons in the Wii U gamepad run to a carbon trace FFC. You can't solder to carbon traces directly like you can with copper traces, but you can use an FFC breakout board of the correct pitch and then solder wires between the breakout board and the GC+

Do you mind rephrasing that? Im kinda stipid lol.

 

[Stitches]

Do you mind rephrasing that? Im kinda stipid lol.

The Wii U gamepad uses a flexible printed circuit/flat flexible cable (FPC/FFC) to connect all the buttons to the gamepad's mainboard rather than using wires. The traces and contacts in flex circuits can be made of copper, silver, or a carbon material. Copper and silver traces can be scratched and soldered to directly, whereas carbon traces cannot be soldered to at all and require a connector. Since the gamepad uses carbon traces, you need what's called a breakout board. Breakout boards are a PCB that has a particular socket on one end, and a heap of through holes on the other end. Each through hole is connected to one pin of the socket, and are easy to solder to. Nicholas298 used them recently in his N64HHv2 project, circled in red.

Basically you get one with the right number of pins with the correct pitch (spacing between the pins in millimetres), socket the FPC into it, figure out the pinout for the FPC, and then you can solder wires to the through holes to connect the controls to your GC+ controller board.

 

[Sethamphetamine]

Thanks! Apreciate the help.