I aim to fit a fully functional PC inside a Wii case, hopefully being the first person to do so. A lot of you may have seen this attempt at the "PC in a Wii case" mod, but I want to keep all the Wii ports intact and include a slim DVD drive. The materials list will be something like this: - Nano-ITX motherboard - Laptop DVD drive - 1.8" HDD (was originally going to use a 2.5", but there wasn't enough room behind the DVD drive for the HDD to sit) - PicoPSU - Broken Wii - bluetooth and Wi-Fi cards I tried and failed to make a PC in Xbox 360 case mod some time ago, so you may be asking yourselves why I would attempt this when I couldn't manage to finish something much larger. Well, squeezing everything into the case will definitely be the hardest part of the mod, but other than that, the Wii has very standard connections which are a lot easier to mod than the 360's - USB and SD. All the front buttons are standard momentary push buttons, which is not the case with the damn 360 dvd drive. As for the video connection, I intend to make a custom VGA cable for the machine; as the motherboard has no HDTV out, I had considered fitting in a VGA to component adapter and using a standard Wii component cable for AV out, but decided VGA would be a better option, as well as being cheaper (the adapter would set me back an extra £40 or so) and freeing up a little bit of space for airflow. Here are a couple of snapshots I've taken so far (very early stages yet): The front of the Wii off - the DVD drive actually sits fairly low inside the case, instead of being flush with the top, so gives me even less room to work with: The Wii motherboard: Front panel and AV ports hacked off so I can solder connections to them: Front panel wired up from left to right - eject, reset & power: SD card slot (will probably redo this, as I can cut off quite a bit more and use a ribbon cable instead): Hooking up the PicoPSU to the Wii PSU. The Wii PSU constantly outputs 12V, which definitely helps (note the motherboard in the background): Things I need to do next: - Find some suitable plastic spacers to use as standoffs (I need to place the motherboard upside down inside the case for eveything to fit, so regular standoffs won't do) - Get some 2.5" IDE adapters for the HDD (which is ZIF) and the DVD drive. I'll also need to solder the IDE cable directly to the DVD drive adapter, otherwise the standard IDE connector will take up too much of the space I've set aside for the HDD. - Find a job so I can keep buying parts Any comments or suggestions are most welcome
Can't say I've ever seen a Wii PC log before, so congrats! I was just wandering what the primary function of this project was. How come you want to keep the standard controller connectors? Good job so far though, I wouldn't be brave enough to hack up a mainboard.
Can't say I've really thought about the primary function of the console - I've just been thinking about doing a mod like this for about 5 years (initially with a Dreamcast, which would be a LOT harder), but have been waiting for Nano-ITX boards to reach half decent spec (the one I have uses an Atom processor). I suppose this could be considered something of a test run, as Nano-ITX boards with Core 2 Duo are just about to be released, so if I pull this off succesfully I could just swap round the boards and use it as a quirky 2nd PC. I want to keep the connections because, having seen a lot of these sorts of mods, the best ones always have a stock look. Besides, I don't see the point in going for the "PC in a whatever" look and then having standard PC connections sticking out all over the place.
Maybe you could make a few custom cables for your KB/Mouse etc and connect the pinouts of the controller ports to the USB headers, so that they have functionallity as well as looks. Just an idea as I'm not sure if it's doable.
It really depends on whether I have the room left for the Gamecube controller ports, but I did think of wiring them up so I could use Gamecube pads. I'll be adding bluetooth, but the Wii does have two USB ports on the back anyway which could be used for keyboard and mouse if need be.
All I can say is I can't wait to see this unfold. I'm quite a big fan of console PC conversions. Seeing as you seem to know your way around the console, could you tell me about the circuitry of the lighting around the slot loading drive on the Wii? I've always liked how it pulses and I'd like to know if I could implement this on a laptop slot loading drive.
Just took a pic of how I hope to place eveything inside the case. Just waiting on some connectors and adapters to arrive from Hong Kong (couldn't resist cheapness over speedy delivery) before I can hook everything up for testing:
A little bit of progress today - soldered the 44pin IDE cable to the ATAPI DVD drive adapter and hooked up evrything for testing. The soldering about half way through: Everything connnected and running off the Wii power supply: Is it generally a hard drive or optical drive issue?: Too tired to work on solving it tonight, but will have a look at it in the morning - I believe the DVD drive may be faulty anyway.
I might have the answer for you mate, I have a few of these sat about, its from a Dell Optiplex PC and fits normal slimline DVD/CD drives, pm me if you want one... P.S this is not my pic, just found it online but same thing
I'll send you a PM about that cable, although the DVD drive is faulty - it won't eject without a lot of coaxing. I don't think my soldering is the problem - I've checked all the connections to make sure they're secure and not touching each other and spent ages making sure the pin numbers were correct. Also, the voltage regulator (at least that's what it looks like) on the IDE to ZIF adapter just went up in smoke; I'll get a 2.5" IDE drive tomorrow so I can test everything one step at a time without having to guess what's not working properly. I may even decide to splash out the extra on a 1.8" IDE drive just to keep things a little simpler. In the meantime, I've had a look at the BIOS to set CD-ROM to boot first and to check out a couple of other things. Voltages from the PicoPSU are all very stable and close to the mark; CPU temp is 35-36 C, although obviously not under load and without any enclosure.
Waiting on some parts from China again, so not been able to do much, but soldered up the SD card slot. At the moment it recognises cards, but asks for them to be formatted and then fails to format - I might resolder it all this evening to see if I can get it working. Obviously if it's messed up then I'll just use a standard SD slot and hot glue it in place (which probably would've been easier in the first place )
OK, still waiting on IDE bits from China, so I did a little more work on the I/O stuff. I resoldered the SD card slot and it recognises it as a mass storage device in Windows, but will not recognise any inserted SD cards. There a 3 connections which I'm not overly sure about, does anyone else know? I assume the one on the left is a card detector, which I have soldered the the connection marked "CD" on the Wii card slot (see the photo in my last post), but nothing happened. I don't know what the other two connections marked in red are though
