Progress For Weeks 8/9

The past couple of weeks have had some mixed results. First, all of the portables are now completely assembled, and have all been put through preliminary testing, which is basically me just testing to make sure audio, all buttons, video, and all of the relocations are working properly. Last week was spent doing this testing and making sure all of the portables work as expected. Unfortunately around 1/3 of the portables had some sort of major issue that took more than a couple hours to iron out. This week has/will be spent working on getting as many of the ones with issues working, and so far that process has gone pretty well. At the end of this week though, the plan is to switch to prepping all of the working portables for shipment and saving the remaining few with issues to work on once those are shipped. This weekend I’ll really reach out for payment from everyone whose portable is working right now, and if yours isn’t one of the working ones then I’ll reach out and let you know what the current situation with yours is.

Progress For Week 7

I definitely made some solid progress this week. All of the back halves are fully assembled, aside from the two that no longer have Wiis, and over half of the fronts are assembled, aside from the joysticks. I’ve decided that the two portables without Wiis will just have to wait until the rest are done, those two are a Pokemon themed one and one of the white GameCube controller themed ones. I plan to spend the rest of this week finishing up the front halves, after that it’ll be testing time.

Also expect me to reach out for the final payment early next week. Everything is coming together!

Progress For Week 6

Last week went pretty well, though everything took longer than I would have liked. All of the boards outside of the Wii got mounted into the back half of the case, and all but two of the portables have a Wii confirmed working inside. Unfortunately one portable killed two Wii boards, so I’ll need to trim a couple more boards.

It’s looking like I’m going to need a couple more weeks to finalize the portables unfortunately. I was hoping to be able to start on the front halves by the end of this week, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m going to try and get the back halves all assembled aside from the two that still don’t have Wiis by the end of this week, and then work on getting a couple more Wiis trimmed to replace the dead ones.

Progress for Week 5

The last week went well. Attaching wires to boards went smoothly, so now all boards are fully prepped for placement into the final cases. I took a couple days to work on prepping a couple of other things, like the cooling systems and trimming all of the extra stuff from all of the resin cast buttons. As of right now, all of the the back halves are partially assembled, and I’m hopeful to get them close to fully assembled by the end of this week. The back half houses just about all of the stuff that takes the hardcore troubleshooting, including the Wii, USB stuffs, and power management, so I’ll know how painful the next couple of weeks are going to be based on how many back halves work right out of the gate. My sketched out plan is to get the back halves assembled this week, the front halves assembled next week, and then spend the last week of February doing troubleshooting on the serious issues. After that I’ll move to testing the finer asepcts, like making sure buttons work consistently and smoothly, and then I’ll be ready to start shipping.

Progress For Week 4

Good progress was made this week. All of the boards I wanted to test got tested and everything worked as expected after a bit of troubleshooting on some of the boards. I had some time to attach wires as desired, but there are a couple of boards left that still need wires. This upcoming week I’ll need a couple of days to finish attaching wires to boards, but I’ll be able to spend the rest of the week working on final assembly! I honestly don’t know what a good goal to set for assembly is, so I’m going to get as much done as I can this week and then lay out a tentative schedule for the rest of the month. Really happy that I’ve been able to follow the schedule almost perfectly thus far, so I’m still on track to be shipping by the end of February.

Progress For Week 3

For this past week, everything got done that I had hoped to, with the exception of attaching the wires to the boards that I wanted to. The assembly of the voltage and USB boards went pretty smoothly, but the Wii trims were more of an issue. By the end of the week I was able to get the Wii boards all modified and prepped for trimming, so no more Wiis will be needed for this run. For this week, the plan is to test everything that was assembled last week. By the end of this week all Wiis and boards should be completely ready to go, with the only work left before assembly being attaching wires to boards.

Week 2 Progress

This week went as planned. All of the Wiis got stripped down and homebrewed, the last wires were cut, the circuit boards I wanted to test got tested, and the front boards now have all of their wires attached. Attaching the wires took longer than I’d expected, so I may need to rearrange my schedule a bit to put more time into that part of the build.

This next week the plan is to assemble the remaining USB boards, the remaining voltage regulation boards, relocate the NAND chips on the other Wiis that need to be trimmed, attach wires to two more types of boards, and end the week by cutting up the Wii boards. It’s definitely the most packed week I’ve scheduled out, so some of it may need to be pushed back if things don’t go well.

Progress For Week 1 of 2021

All right, so this blog’s purpose is to serve as an announcement table for the twenty of you wonderful people who have purchased Wiiboy Colors and have had to deal with my atrocious communication skills. Most of this stems from being overwhelmed with messages from people interested in taking on commissions, but it has extended into being pretty unresponsive to almost everyone who contacts me. I’m working to improve on that and this should help a lot.

The idea is that once a week I sit down and take 10 minutes to type out what got done last week and what the plan is for the next week of work. In addition to keeping you well informed as to the status of your commissions, this should also better keep me aware of how ahead or behind I am. Right now the plan is to have a post ready to go by Sunday of each week.

So now I’ll go ahead and give a status update on all Wiiboy Color orders placed since October. This article will be a lot longer than future ones, as I’m going to try to condense 3 months of work into a single post.

The plan was to cap at 20 orders, and I stuck to that. The idea in taking on so many was that it would be faster to turn out 20 than it would be to turn out 4 groups of 5 portables, as I would be able to assemble 20 custom boards at once, cut 20 Wiis at once, cut 20 wires at once, in order to be more efficient. After seeing how everything has played out I don’t think I would do this again, but we’re here now so I’m going to follow through as promised. The one aspect I feel this actually did work really well in was the trimming of the Wiis. I was able to prep 20 Wiis for trimming fairly efficiently, and when it was all said and done 16 out of the 20 wiis I prepped still work after having their brains rewired and being hacked to bits by my Dremel. I will need to cut up a few more in order to have enough for all of the builds, which is part of my plan for the month of January.

The vast majority of the time has been spent assembling and testing the custom circuit boards needed for the Wiiboy Colors. There are 4 boards in every portable that require more than trivial effort to get assembled, and two of these boards are particularly complex. I won’t bore you with the details too much, but getting 20 of each of the more complicated boards to actually be fully functional has been my own personal hell. As of right now, I have 16 of one board all polished up and 10 of the other assembled and ready for testing. Getting all of the remaining boards assembled and tested is the other big task for the month of January. All of the boards have been hand assembled by me, which is nice because I don’t have to work with anyone else to ensure that everything goes smoothly, but awful because this means that I’m the one who has to deal with all of my mistakes.

The rest of the last few months have been spent working on things that don’t take much time in my head, but when I have to do a relatively short task 20 times it ends up taking considerably longer than I would have liked it to. I decided that I wanted to cut and prep every single wire needed for the builds beforehand, so that way when I need a wire I can just pull it out of a baggie rather than take the time to measure out, cut, and tin a wire every time I need one. It was a solid idea, but in my mind it was just a one day project, because my small brain goes “cutting wires? easy. tinnning wires? easy.” and never stopped to think about the fact that even though cutting and tinning one wire takes less than a minute, when a portable uses ~70 wires and I have 20 portables to cut wires for, all of the sudden I realize that prepping all 1400+ wires will take me much, much longer than a single day. Other things that got done included modifying 20 driver boards to make the screen properly fit in the portable, making molds for the custom buttons, getting casts of the necessary custom buttons, and a handful of other tasks that are small on their own, but considerably less small when done 20 times. And that’s pretty much been the story on why things have been progressing across the board so slowly. The good news is that I am genuinely getting close to being finished. I listed out everything left to do before plugging everything together, and then turned that into a schedule with tasks to be completed every day until February in order to be ready for nothing but assembling and testing portables in February.

Right now, I’m really, really pushing to have all of the Wiiboy Colors at least assembled by the end of February, and get as many of them shipped during then as I can. I’m sure that inevitably a couple of them are going to be really stubborn and take more time to get polished, but with any luck yours won't be like that.

Again. I apologize for this all taking so long. My time estimates were genuine at the time they were given, but I thought that having a design that relied on so many custom boards would work to improve turnaround time, and that was a misjudgement on my part. Motivation has fluctuated, being particularly low during December, but a couple weeks off for the holidays has me feeling much better and going forward I’m working to balance my schedule in a way that doesn’t burn me out, but still produces solid progress. I think that’s about all I have to say, again your patience is really appreciated. Expect to see another post on the 17th going over the progress made this week (which is planned to be cutting the last few sets of wires, prepping the last Wiis for trimming, attaching all the wires to one type of board, and to finish testing a set of circuit boards I’ve had waiting to test since before the break for the holidays).

And my apologies if there’s still remnants of the default blog text scattered around here, I think I’ve eliminated it all but if you something that sounds weird and pretentious then it’s probably not there on purpose