Nintendo Wii-remote dissection.
news via ign
We go Dexter on the Wii's main controller. Satisfy your morbrid curiosity and see it disemboweled within.
November 21, 2006 - It's an open secret that the Wii-remote was originally designed as a GameCube peripheral. Nintendo, however, pursuing the highly publicized 'Blue Ocean' corporate strategy, saw the opportunity to launch a console that would parallel the DS market plan in an entirely new market by means of a new console designed around the freedom provided by a motion-sensing remote controller. The Wii was the result, a console that will lean heavily upon the hypothetically genre-busting gaming innovations that will result due to the console's unique control scheme.
We know the Wii is powered by an IBM CPU and an ATI GPU, and we'd lobotomize one if we had the heart for it. Since we're sensitive peeps, we decided instead to cut straight to the real heart and sole of the Wii: the Wiimote.
Fully assembled, the Wiimote feels well balanced and rather comfortable in hand. It has a good weight, thanks primarily to the batteries, that feels neither too light nor too heavy. Once we broke open the case, however, we discovered quite a bit less circuitry than we had expected.
The Wiimote is held together by four screws, two of which are hidden under the battery compartment. The screws are a propriety three-bit Nintendo design. Actual maintenance kits with proper Nintendo screw-drivers are available through various sources online, however, none were available in time for this feature. Giving up on the potential for actually reassembling our sacrificial Wiimote, we applied a power drill with a 1/8-inch bit and drilled out the screws, which was actually pretty easy.
Once the securing screws were destroyed, the Wiimote came apart quite easily. The plastic buttons connected to the typical silicon membrane electrical connectors as with just about any other controller on the market.
The Wii circuit board looks sparse but actually does quite a lot. The largest chip on the board is the WiFi chip supplied by Broadcom. Motion-sensing wise; forget any imaginative images of a tiny gyroscope spinning inside a tiny box on the circuit board. The Wiimotes accelerometers are based upon miniscule, one-millionth of a gram flaps of silicon flexing against tiny springs within a charged field.
The main Wiimote's accelerometers are supplied by Analog Devices Inc., which declines to specify where on the Wiimote's board its chips reside. Many of the chips on the Wiimote are not labeled, at least not to the natural human eye, but we will speculate that the primary accelerometer chip is the small rectangular one located upon the top side (when held in hand) of the circuit board, in between the 'A' and +, -, and Home button receptors.
Had we not drilled out the screws, we believe we would have been able to reassemble the Wiimote relatively easily. The overall construction of the Wiimote is heavily built and outside of utter destruction via crushing, we expect that the Wiimotes will be able to withstand quite a lot of abuse in the wild. We've already had a wrist-strap-snapping incident that sent a Wiimote flying into a wall. The wall was the decided loser of that battle and suffered a nasty dent, whereas the Wiimote emerged entirely unscathed.
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