Wii Industries Two Thousand (LED Hack)

When I saw the black Wii, my first thought was "oh, Nintendo's finally making different color Wiis". Then it was followed up with "That needs to look like Knight Rider".

So in this hack, which took far more effort than I planned to put into it, I replace the blue glowing LEDs around the drive slot with a red LED chaser. The chaser is still driven by the Wii, so it turns on at the appropriate times and should run continuously when mail is waiting (haven't checked this yet!)

Software is available here: http://www.harmlesslion.com/software/wiitt

Video is available at YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwgolKTb3cc

In theory, the build was simple. I used what I had onhand, so an Atmel ATMega168 AVR powers the LEDs via PWM (overkill!), providing the ability to read a trigger and also provide a fade out of the running LEDs. Any AVR can probably be made to run this code.

The goal was that the Wii's PWM would trigger the AVR, but the Wii's LED is powered in a manner I'm not too familiar with. No surprise, there's lots I'm not familiar with, but with a voltage divider and a stable ground I was able to get a clean PWM to work with - schematic is below.

The fit was nigh-impossible.. it's tighter than I'd like. Also, my tri-wing screwdriver is too short to reach the rear Wii screws, limiting me to the front panel. So, to cheat, I stuffed the IC into the SD panel, and collect power from the SD slot itself. To get SD power, I modified a Micro-SD adapter to run two wires out for power and nothing else.

Enjoy the pics!