Wii Sensor Bar Projector

Recently I've been playing my Wii more and more, and it's really great to play with a few friends on a big screen projector.

The problem is, any games that use the pointer need the sensor bar set up. With my projector that means having the Wii in the middle of the room and balancing the sensor bar on a chair so all the wires reach, no good at all.

In this post I'll write about how I built a sensor bar "projector" to overcome these problems without having to fix anything permanently to the wall.

My Backlit Dreamcast VMU

Love it or hate it, the DC controller was pretty innovative. Analogue stick in the "right" place, analogue triggers, and of course the VMU.

The VMU slotted into the controller and could display extra game information like health or ammo.

It also served as the memory card, and could download mini-games to play independently of the main console. Cool, right?

So I made a back-light for mine, no real reason other than why not?

It's not even the beginning of the end...

Last year I was working on an N64 portable, but it ended up getting lost a while back.

I've been planning a new one for a long time, and just got a new 64 at the weekend so I started cutting the board down and doing some wiring.

RAM/PIF swapped, RGB modded and cart-slot RCP wired.

I'm quite busy at the moment so won't be doing any more work on it for a quite while. But at least I've got the ball rolling.

My Darling Dreamcast

♪♫ Two thousand zero zero party over oops.... out of time ♫♪
♪♫ So, to-night I'm gonna party like it's 1999 ♫♪

It's been over ten years since the dreamcast came out, and since I'd recently dug-out my old dc, I thought I'd take a few pics of it to show-off some of my earlier mods.

There she is, in all her beautiful blue glory, a launch-day PAL DC with a two-tone translucent blue shell and a few extra goodies inside.

PSOne screen led-mod

The PSOne screen is great, a major drawback though, is it's high power consumption. Out of the box, it draws about 750mA at 7.5V, almost all of that is to power the backlight.

In this post I'll describe how I saved power with a custom led backlight.

How to build a circuit on Veroboard

There are a few ways to build an electronic circuit, one of the easiest is to use Veroboard.

Veroboard or stripboard is a prototyping board for laying out circuits. It has rows of parallel copper strips with holes spaced at 0.1” to accept most through-hole components.

In this post, I'll try to explain how to build a simple circuit on Veroboard.

Low-battery indicator circuit

I designed this little circuit to show a battery’s status.

It lights an led to show the battery is OK, and will change to show another colour when the battery’s low.

The transistors can be any npn-type, and the leds can be any colour (in the diagram, green=ok, red=low)

The operating voltage range is ~3v-12v, and by adjusting the resistor values it will work beyond that.

The voltage the low led comes on at, is set by the potentiometer.

Momentary latching circuit

Here is a little circuit I made that will allow a momentary switch to turn on/off a load.

Q1 can be any NPN transistor, and Q2 is any N-channel MOSFET capable of handling the current being switched. It should be fine with a range of ~5-12V but I've only tested it at 7.4V.

It somewhat mimics the action of a newer console's power button. I made it so I could switch a relatively large amount of power with a small tactile switch, press for on, press again for off.