Wii hard drive switcher mod

If you use nintendont then you know you can't have more than hard drive plugged in at the same time. For a while I've had two hard drives sitting next to my Wii; one with actual Wii games and the other with gamecube games. I was content with physically switching usb cable out etc. But it's a pain when the console is tucked away in its spot. I came up with a basic usb switcher. Concept is simple: It's a 2 to 1 usb device with a simple tactile switch. This device runs on 3.3v but could run up to 5v. If the Wii is turned on the button has no effect, so no worries accidentally spinning one hard drive down and the other up. In the picture the led looks pretty bright, but in reality not so much. There is a pot on board so you can control the brightness to your liking. I still need to apply some double sided tape to keep the switch board in one spot (There are no components on the bottom so it lays flat.)

Pictures!

 

Damn dude thats an awesome idea, how the heck did you get that made up so nicely

 

Apart from the ugly dyno labeling. It's quite nice.

 

Is there a reason that you can't just have one drive large enough for everything?

I remember when I softmodded my wii. It added so many features that Nintendo should have added themselves, like dvd playback and playing full games from hd

 

Yeah Nintendo should have added support for piracy out of the box

 

Interesting device and nice work but it looks like a bit of overengineering to me. Because you can simple partition one HDD to NTFS and FAT32 and use Nintendont. 2Tb 2.5" w/o external power or 3.5" 4 or (omg) 6Tb with separate PSU looks more than enough for me - do you really need to have ALL your games on HDD at same time?

 

Both drives are already fat32. And yep I want them all on the drive at the same time.

 

This is merely because all your games don't fit on the same HDD?
Because I have both wii and gamecube games on my 2.5" usb hdd (single partition IIRC) with no problem...
Not a ton of games though...

 

They honestly could all fit if I used a different drive. I've had these drives with the same games for ages. This project was about 20 bucks all together, so significantly cheaper than buying a new drive. Not that I'm hurting for money, but can't say I want to invest anything more than 20 bucks into a wii.

This was also more of test for potential other projects, such as sd card switching etc. Not to mention I just like designing pcb's and working on small projects.

 

I can honestly understand the interest in doing that small pcb just for fun though!