Converting an old Wii into an M1 Mac mini was the BEST IDEA

This is a Mac Mini M1 and I think most of us would agree that it's essentially one of the

best

deals you can find in all of computing, but I think we'd also agree that it's a bit boring, this design has It's been around for about a decade and I mean, okay, what more could you ask for? It's a little square that sits on your desk, but this is Luciana's YouTube channel, so if you think I'm going to sit here happy with this, well, I'm not even close to today's. The video is sponsored by Pulseway. Imagine having the power to remotely control any of your systems, wherever you are walking the dog, shopping on a date, or heading out on a hike.

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idea

to say hello Mac Mini inside the Wii, there's very little that I'm. physically being able to do that would stop me from trying it now, that doesn't mean it's a bad

idea

because I mean, when you look at these two things, they're kind of similar, sure the Mac Mini is a little bit taller, but the width is about the same. same, the thickness is about the same and one of my favorite things about the Wii is that it has these hatches on the top where you can plug in your controllers, so wouldn't it be nice if you put the back of the Mac on?

Mini right here and then you could use the i or and if you don't need it you can close it. How perfect would that be, so what more do you want? I mean, they're the same shape as the Mac Mini. a little taller so maybe some things don't fit, but when did that stop me? So yeah, let's do this first step. Well, we have to tear down this Wii to see if this is physically possible. Fortunately, when you really take all the guts out of it. In the case of a Wii, the case snaps back on quite easily, meaning we should be able to screw everything together with a Mac Mini inside.

The Mac Mini, on the other hand, is very, very simple, with about a dozen screws holding this entire device together. Their electronics repair kit, which will be on sale throughout November, has everything you need, from T6 and T8 screw bits to picks and sponges that definitely help in some of those hard-to-reach areas. iFixit is a long time sponsor of the channel and I use their stuff every day, so now with the Mac Mini taken apart, the parts list includes the case, the plastic bottom cover, the metal antenna plate, the logic, power supply and fan to fit the innards of the Mac Mini inside the Wii. case we are going to need to make some modifications, there is just no way we are going to fit this huge power supply and bulky fan inside the small Wii case with this in mind, I can put together a list of requirements, it's the first thing we're going to do . need a smaller fan to keep the temperatures from getting too high, second, I'm going to need to make a new power supply, third, I decided it would be a good idea to run HDMI on the back of the Wii because I have to plug it in from the top It defeats the purpose of using the controller covers to hide the ports and with those requirements in mind I started making some modifications to the case first, the coin cell battery tray had to be glued on so it wouldn't fall out all the time continuation.

I needed to fix the mechanisms that allow the controller doors to stay closed because they are on an internal frame that we removed, so I used some cutting tools to trim these little clips that were screwed back into their original holes and let the doors close to continuation. I had to polish the top of the case where the controller ports are molded in plastic to make room for the Mac Mini's i o, so with the case modified, it was time to find a solution for our power supply. Fortunately, I benefited from working with Quinn from snazzy Labs who already modified his Mac Mini and provided the pins for the power supply connection, so we opened up the Mac

mini

's dramatically unnecessary 150-watt power supply so we could isolate the connector after checking everything with a multimeter this is what we came up with that six of the wires grouped in green are the 12 volt positive line and the black is our ground and then there are a couple more wires that are not connected to nothing, so there's really no need to connect them at all.

We hooked this contraption up to a buck converter and checked to see if the system worked, and surprisingly, it did. Now we have to figure out how to feed it initially. I wanted to use USBC to make things easier. This literally comes out of two alligator clips. directly to a PD board, oh man, but while powering up there were issues with voltage and getting a clean signal, plus we wanted to keep the Wii as original as possible, so I had an idea that we already had the power socket from Wii that we released. off the board, so why not just use that the Wii's power supply is 12 volts at 53 watts, so in most cases you should have enough power to run a humble Mac Mini with the supply Wii power plug connected to the Wii plug with a cable up to a dollar?

Converter connected to Mac Mini wiring harness, turned it on but there was a problem. 53 Watts wasn't enough to make the Mac Mini happy under maximum load, so I was severely limiting its performance, so I cut off the end of the Wii instead. I turned off the charger and connected it to a Microsoft Surface charger with enough power for us to use it. I'm really excited about this because I'm now at the point in this project where I have the power delivery system more or less. I noticed a couple things have changed number one. I ended up buying a buck converter that has some pretty big heatsinks.

That will help me with some of the problems I had with the old ones that were getting very hot and Another problem I was also having was that the Mac Mini was getting very hot because we don't have room for its original cooling fan, so the solution is that I picked up this little 12 volt fan that happens to have the exact dimensions. from the original cooling fan for the Wii, all of this is to say that we've created a beautiful monster on this end. Here we have a surface charger that I have spliced ​​into the original Wii power connector that connects to the step down converter here. which turns on the 12 volt fan which is on constantly and will provide some airflow to hopefully keep things pretty cool which then goes into the Mac Mini we can turn on the Mac Mini and there it goes so now what we have What to do is put it all together.

Of this we have a modified Wii chassis, we have a modified power supply solution, but we have to put all of these things together, so that meant learning how to 3D print a bracket to mount the Mac Mini inside. on the Wii and this is my first time. 3d print. I admit it took a fair amount of prototyping to get this to work, but I finally settled on this design and I'm very happy with the result because basically the holes in this square are designed to fit perfectly over the screw posts. There is no need to screw or glue on the Wii case.

It just friction fits, then there are two standoffs sticking out of this that allow me to screw the Mac Mini logic board into this guy and they're positioned to take advantage of that ribbon cable that you may have seen right, which is a very thin HDMI extension, so which there is an L-shaped plug that connects to the Mac Mini and then we run the cable under this stand and it comes out the back of the Wii and Finally, this stand has a rectangular hole that allows me to put a fan in there. Now, I had to cut the top of the shell off to actually fit the shell, but now we have a certain amount of cooling, so in addition to printing that bottom bracket, I also printed this nifty little one that doesn't look like much and It's not very well made because I'm not good at 3D printing, however, basically all you have to do is stick it with double sided tape where the outlet should be and it keeps it in place without glue or tape, so when you assemble the weed you can plug things in and the power port will stay where it is.

In fact, I'm quite happy with the result. I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but that was great, okay, now everything is assembled here, we have the charger, let's go ahead and plug it in, the fan turns on immediately, we'll press the power button here, there. it is going well. I have to say that I am very satisfied with the result, but there is still one problem that I would like to solve. If you look very closely you'll notice that our connection really isn't very good and that's because the Mac Mini has three antenna bands, two of which are on the logic board, but unfortunately the third antenna is on this bottom plate metal and this just isn't going to fit.

Now you could destroy this bottom plate, take out the antenna and plug it in here. but I don't want to destroy this because I want to be able to reassemble the Mac Mini, so I have another plan. This is one of the original Wii antennas and wouldn't you know it, the connector is exactly the same. Based on what the Mac Mini uses, can we improve the responsiveness of our Bluetooth accessories and boost Wi-Fi speeds well to find out? Let's get a baseline reading, so before we even start the test, it is very evident that the mouse is having trouble connecting via Bluetooth. skipping, it stutters, it's not even really usable in my opinion now the Wi-Fi works and it actually works pretty well so we got a 270 megabits per second download, however when we plugged in the antenna removed from the Wii things They change dramatically, first of all. we can instantly notice the difference in the responsiveness of the mouse and keyboard, it just works perfectly and when we start the speed test you can see we are jumping from 279 to over 400 megabits per second, so with all this taken care of we now have a Fully operational Mac Mini inside a Wii case, all we have to do is close this up and make it nice and polished.

This is easily my favorite project I've done on this channel. I am absolutely impressed with how everything turned out. Here I want to say that usually when I do this type of project it ends up being a little strange and let's be honest, impractical when I put a Mac Mini inside an iMac, it prevented you from using any of the ports, but this is the most perfect thing. Beautiful creation I came up with, we have power running through the original Wii power plug, we have an HDMI coming out the back to maintain this slim aesthetic, we even have full access to the ports with the doors on the top.

It works exactly as it should, it's beautiful and I love it, but in all seriousness, the two things that surprise me the most are the two things I had to change, the power supply and the fan. Now it's no secret that the M1 Mac

mini

s 150-watt power supply and huge fan are complete. Overkill, you don't need that, but I'm very surprised at how well my substitutions have worked. This crazy Surface Charger contraption plugged into the Wii's power port plugged into a dollar. The converter connected to the Mac Mini wiring harness works perfectly. I haven't had any problems with the power delivery and the other thing that really surprises me is the fan you imagine going from a big bulky fan with a lot of airflow to a small 12 volt RPM static fan with half of its cut-out case and that you would probably miss a lot thermally, but not now, obviously the M1 chip doesn't produce a ton of heat, so you could leave it without a fan, but if you do that, what I noticed is that very quickly temperatures will rise to 100 degrees Celsius, at which point the system has to thermally accelerate and the result is that you lose a good portion of your performance, however, these 12 volts. fan, although only providing a small amount of airflow, actually goes a long way in maintaining thecool system and although it gets hotter than the stock fan would allow, it's not unreasonable and if you take a look at these performance comparisons you'll notice that you're only losing a couple of percent with this little 12 volt fan compared with the original system, so I'm perfectly comfortable using this machine with this implementation which is pretty crazy, so there you have it, a fully operational Mac Mini inside a Wii is not only one of the coolest projects I've ever done. worked, but it's also pretty useful because Apple is still very good at emulating old game consoles, especially the Wii, so of course I had to install Dolphin and plug this thing in.

I walk over to my TV and put a Mario Kart Wii on it and oh my goodness this is the moment this whole project just clicked running around some of my favorite Wii Mario Kart tracks while looking at the Wii it was on would have run originally, but it's running in 4k on a 75 inch 16x9 TV, which is honestly one of the most incredible things I've ever witnessed and it's not just Wii gaming. I turned on GameCube's Mario Kart Double Dash which works perfectly, also The Legend of Zelda the windmaker. That worked pretty well again, these are all updating to resolutions you would never think of playing those games at and it looks like you're running it on a Wii.

I can't stress. That's enough, but it's not just about Nintendo games because Apple silicon is also very good at emulating the PlayStation 2. So I fired up Midnight Club 3 w Edition Remix, one of my favorites of all. olden times, and soon I'm driving around San Diego in a blue Golf R32 like the mid-2000s. Honestly, I think this is one of the best things you can do with a Mac Mini to turn it into a device. really cool retro game console that looks like a retro game console and yes, sure you could have the boring old Mac Mini on your TV stand and do everything the same, but it's a little more special when you play a game of Wii while watching a Wii, so this is like the best project ever.

I loved. I think it was very fun. I learned to solder. I learned how to 3D print. I bought a grinder and I'll leave links to all the things I used in today's video from the iFixit guides to taking apart your Mac Mini to the Protec tool kit that you can take it apart with. Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring. I'll leave links below to the schematics of the 3D printed parts I used in this build. Anything I can think of is down there, thank you all so much for watching this video. I had a lot of fun.

I can't wait to do more fun things with Mac Minis and with you, so be sure to like, comment and subscribe, and we'll see you next time.