I finished turning my Wii U kiosk into an Arcade Machine
So I finished my four month long project. As I have mentioned a few times on Nintendoage, I got a Wii U Kiosk and have been conistantly been working on repairing and modifying it for full functionality. What I came up with, was that I could turn it into an arcade machine by mounting a cheap PC Joystick to it, modify said joystick to have a raspberry pi computer inside of it, and mount it where the gamepad used to be. Before anyone gets on my case for modifying it, I damaged none of the original parts that I had. Any part that needed to be modifed was removed to that way it can be restored back to stock if I choose to do so. Anyway let the slideshow begin!
Let's Start with the kiosk itself, I attached a few pictures to show what it looks like on the outside, and to show how I mounted the arcade controller. I used retropie to load emulators like MAME onto it, that way I can put whatever I want on there. I hooked up the video, audio, and power to the arcade stick/pi by running flat cables into the stick from where the reset button was, that was a major pain.
The first thing that I did to the kiosk was restore audio functionality as my TV was unable to output anything other than crackling sound. My solution was to just straight up bypass the TV for audio. This worked out really well because the Wii U can output audio through the AV ports while sending video through HDMI, so I was able to capture it along with the raspberry pi's audio in order to make a switch box to switch between the two consoles. From there, I put the audio switch and the volume knob to where the gamepad wire and extra lock used to be, both used custom sleeves and knobs which I did not upload as they were done for me and the parts aren't necessarily standard. In the picture, the blue box on the right is the custom splitter box, and the box on the left is the amplifier. Suprisingly, the audio sounds very crisp and clean with not a whole lot of white noise unless I turn it up all the way.
The next major thing that I did had to be the longest step as there were so many attempts at making it perfect but didn't quite come into fruition, was remaking the hardwired controllers. This I am most dissappointed in because I couldn't quite figure out how to get these things to work perfectly as the cables that came with the kiosk have diodes in them jumping signals together, making it impossible for a perfect one to one connection. I settled by just using the wires to support little boxes that are mounted together. What's special about these little boxes is that they have headers on them so that way I can jump the box's signals for the wiimote and nunchuck respectively using a small ribbon cable. The challenge here was that I had to redo it because I accidentally pulled one of the headers clean off the board along with the traces. I just used off the shelf surfboard to mount little smd headers to this, nothing special.
From there, my next big project was finding a better solution for the main power source. Essentially, I got tired of having to open the cabinet up to flip the power strip to just turn the stupid thing on. My solution was to make my own custom vent with an IEC computer plug with a fuse and switch on the outside, and a wall outlet on the inside. This is the most jerry-rigged thing on the kiosk and quite frankly, I am just happy I found a cheap solution to this.
One small annoyance for me were the buttons for the TV, I got new longer buttons so that way they were not recessed in as much, not really a big deal, but a major annoyance for me.
The last thing that I made for this was the amiibo stands. This was probably the most problematic of them all due to the 3d printing process. Designing them with the logos and such was easy enough, took a couple of hours and they looked great. But when I went to print them, they kept failing as it kept getting offset on the y-axis. So me, who has encountered this before thought, well the y axis belt just need to be tightened, which it did. Still failed for the same reason. At this point I noticed that the extruder head was leaking filament from the top, meaning that somewhere in the assembly was a crack. So I ordered a new assembly. Thermister doesn't fit in because it was designed on a friday, jerry-rigged that, feed filament in, instantly clogs. After about an hour I finally unclogged it and was able to finally finish printing the stands. Lot's of work for something as simple as that! Anyway, I made ones with logos on the bottom for each of the characters as it would look cooler. I actually just uploaded these to thingiverse today. There are 10 different variations of them, 9 of which are logo variations.
From there, I decided to put all my not-for-resale demo carts and gameboy protos under the acrylic so that way I can display them as they are some of my more rarer stuff.
Anyway that's all that I have to show off, thanks for bearing with me on this long post. I just thought that you guys here would enjoy seeing the work that I did on this. If you have any questions on how I did things, feel free to ask as I may have an answer. Most of the stuff I made for this is available for free download so that you can 3d print the parts that I used also. The kiosk isn't quite done, there are a few small things that I would like to do, 90% of it being proper wire management. Thanks for taking a look at it.
Note, if anyone has legitimate wired wiimotes, I would be interested if you decide to sell them. If that's the case shoot me a PM.
Links to download the files that I used:
Amiibo stands: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2417034/#files
Kiosk parts: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2096013
The rest of my designs: https://www.thingiverse.com/SNESNESCUBE64/designs
Let's Start with the kiosk itself, I attached a few pictures to show what it looks like on the outside, and to show how I mounted the arcade controller. I used retropie to load emulators like MAME onto it, that way I can put whatever I want on there. I hooked up the video, audio, and power to the arcade stick/pi by running flat cables into the stick from where the reset button was, that was a major pain.
The first thing that I did to the kiosk was restore audio functionality as my TV was unable to output anything other than crackling sound. My solution was to just straight up bypass the TV for audio. This worked out really well because the Wii U can output audio through the AV ports while sending video through HDMI, so I was able to capture it along with the raspberry pi's audio in order to make a switch box to switch between the two consoles. From there, I put the audio switch and the volume knob to where the gamepad wire and extra lock used to be, both used custom sleeves and knobs which I did not upload as they were done for me and the parts aren't necessarily standard. In the picture, the blue box on the right is the custom splitter box, and the box on the left is the amplifier. Suprisingly, the audio sounds very crisp and clean with not a whole lot of white noise unless I turn it up all the way.
The next major thing that I did had to be the longest step as there were so many attempts at making it perfect but didn't quite come into fruition, was remaking the hardwired controllers. This I am most dissappointed in because I couldn't quite figure out how to get these things to work perfectly as the cables that came with the kiosk have diodes in them jumping signals together, making it impossible for a perfect one to one connection. I settled by just using the wires to support little boxes that are mounted together. What's special about these little boxes is that they have headers on them so that way I can jump the box's signals for the wiimote and nunchuck respectively using a small ribbon cable. The challenge here was that I had to redo it because I accidentally pulled one of the headers clean off the board along with the traces. I just used off the shelf surfboard to mount little smd headers to this, nothing special.
From there, my next big project was finding a better solution for the main power source. Essentially, I got tired of having to open the cabinet up to flip the power strip to just turn the stupid thing on. My solution was to make my own custom vent with an IEC computer plug with a fuse and switch on the outside, and a wall outlet on the inside. This is the most jerry-rigged thing on the kiosk and quite frankly, I am just happy I found a cheap solution to this.
One small annoyance for me were the buttons for the TV, I got new longer buttons so that way they were not recessed in as much, not really a big deal, but a major annoyance for me.
The last thing that I made for this was the amiibo stands. This was probably the most problematic of them all due to the 3d printing process. Designing them with the logos and such was easy enough, took a couple of hours and they looked great. But when I went to print them, they kept failing as it kept getting offset on the y-axis. So me, who has encountered this before thought, well the y axis belt just need to be tightened, which it did. Still failed for the same reason. At this point I noticed that the extruder head was leaking filament from the top, meaning that somewhere in the assembly was a crack. So I ordered a new assembly. Thermister doesn't fit in because it was designed on a friday, jerry-rigged that, feed filament in, instantly clogs. After about an hour I finally unclogged it and was able to finally finish printing the stands. Lot's of work for something as simple as that! Anyway, I made ones with logos on the bottom for each of the characters as it would look cooler. I actually just uploaded these to thingiverse today. There are 10 different variations of them, 9 of which are logo variations.
From there, I decided to put all my not-for-resale demo carts and gameboy protos under the acrylic so that way I can display them as they are some of my more rarer stuff.
Anyway that's all that I have to show off, thanks for bearing with me on this long post. I just thought that you guys here would enjoy seeing the work that I did on this. If you have any questions on how I did things, feel free to ask as I may have an answer. Most of the stuff I made for this is available for free download so that you can 3d print the parts that I used also. The kiosk isn't quite done, there are a few small things that I would like to do, 90% of it being proper wire management. Thanks for taking a look at it.
Note, if anyone has legitimate wired wiimotes, I would be interested if you decide to sell them. If that's the case shoot me a PM.
Links to download the files that I used:
Amiibo stands: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2417034/#files
Kiosk parts: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2096013
The rest of my designs: https://www.thingiverse.com/SNESNESCUBE64/designs
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