Wii U Kiosk WIS-001 and WIS-003 teardown

The Nintendo Wii U kiosk GamePad (WIS-003) appears to be a retrofitted retail GamePad controller.

The battery compartment contains two PCBs. The first PCB (DRCI-RELAY-01) takes a six pin connector from the Wii U console routes it to the battery connector. As far as I can tell this cable only carries power. It has a button and a blue/black cable which disappears into the controller. The button is the GamePad's power button, which is disabled on the front. The blue/black cable is soldered to where the power button would normally be.

The RF board does some RF voodoo. I have no idea. There's a small switch on the underside.



The main board looks identical to the retail release, but P22 is populated with a PCB RF connector. The wireless daughter-board normally routes two RF cables off to the left. These are instead routed into the battery compartment.







The console, WIS-001, is a little more exotic. It has two boards not present in retail consoles: CATI-RELAY-01 and CATI-CTRL. The motherboard is WUP-CR-01, and has some additional headers present. It appears to be a different spin of the board than the final retail board. The DVD drive is a normal retail version, RD-DKL034ND in my case.

 

Very nice pictures! thank you.

 

Also if someone has insight as to how to sync the gamepad with the console, I would be grateful. The sync button on the kiosk console doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Awesome! I think Relay may be for connecting a developer/debugging device or computer? I'm not into Wii U stuff, lol. But that looks really good!

 

The two relay boards appear to be just for passing various signals around. The relay board in the controller passes power around. The relay board in the console sits between the front panel and the console, passing signals back to CATI-CTRL. I believe the SW1 on the CATI-CTRL board can reset the console via this path.

 

you said the RF relay has a button, what happens if you press it? Probs switches "wireless" channel.

On the main board follow the traces from SW4 (the sync button), it probably goes through some passives at some point, which most likely are not populated..

On the retail units there is a fuse on the opposite side of the PCB (going off pics online, I don't have my system open)

 

Thank you for posting a teardown of the controller, especially the RF leads! This is important as it might allow one to mod a retail controller to work with a kiosk unit or a devkit.

-doulomb

 

It's a switch, I'm not sure what it does yet since I can't pair the gamepad. It may just switch between the different RF connectors on that board.

Hmm, I'll have to open it back up. There must be a way to pair the gamepad when servicing these in the field if the button is effectively disconnected. Maybe some kind of service disc?

 

Try the switch on the controller Wifi relay, you do have the coax connected between the gamepad and console yes?

It seems the button on the DRCI relay power board is for turning the system on, are the bule/black wires go directly too the on button on the controller?

Some more pictures of the mobo would help, is there even a switch on the mobo for sync?

 

you need this

 

Care to explain what that device is? Can it be replaced with an off the shelf solution?

-doulomb

 

it's the power button

 

The power button for the console? The button on the front seems to work as expected.

 

I just got one of these (console only), and the front two USB ports are blocked by plastic. Are yours?

 

no, for the gamepad

 

Mine are not. You very likely have the model with the HDD inside rather than the optical disc drive. The HDD plugs into the front USB ports and that white cable which comes from the motherboard.

The gamepad has a power button on the DRCI-RELAY board. It also just starts up on its own when power is applied.

 

The RF board might be a dummy board to simulate RF and run it as a wired line instead.

 

I just acquired a WIS-001 Wii U Kiosk console without a kiosk GamePad, and would love to find a way to connect it up to a retail GamePad if possible. As mentioned earlier the sync button on the console doesnt appear to do anything, and I can only watch the game trailer movie on repeat

Interestingly I did notice that if you tap the sync button repeatedly whilst the console is booting up the trailer doesnt play and it ends up booting to a black screen. I thought perhaps the console was defaulting to the analog output instead of HDMI, but after testing with a Wii Component cable there was still no video signal.

Some other things I attempted t try and access the 'sync mode' screen:-
-Shorting the two "S-SW" pins on the rear of the console doesnt appear to do anything (I thought the letters may have been short for "Sync Switch" but I guess not) Its interesting that the same two pin port is present on the extra kiosk part code1038 posted above, I wonder what its for?
-Removing the small 5-pin jumper connector from the motherboard also doesnt appear to enable the sync mode.

aspect, is there any chance of some close-up pictures of both sides of the two extra Kiosk GamePad PCB's? (It would also be great if you can desolder the metal shielding to identify the RF IC underneath) Also, have you tried syncing using the red sync button on the rear of the GamePad with everything connected and powered on? (Short and long press the button) If you do manage to sync the GamePad I would love to know if the kiosk GamePad can operate with a retail GamePad battery instead of the power cable/PCB.

 

Inside the shielding there are two RF 3021 T030 chips (http://www.rfmd.com/store/downloads/dl/file/id/29896/rf3021_data_sheet.pdf). On the bottom there's a SOT-32 discrete with 3B25L etched on the top, I can't find any datasheets for it. The bottom also has the two position switch. The rest of the board is tiny passives.

I'll try to snag close up pictures when I have a chance.

The sync button on the rear of the gamepad works as expected and brings the gamepad into sync mode. I'd imagine the game pad would work with a retail battery.

I toned out the DCRI-RELAY-01 board. The six pin cable that connects it to the console carries three things: VCC, GND, and a line for the gamepad's power button. The console can short the power signal line to GND to simulate a power button press on the gamepad (so the gamepad powers on when the console does). It doesn't look like a signal to sync is sent on that cable. All of the grounds are connected together.

Pins:
1 GND
2 Power signal
3 GND
4 VCC
5 GND
6 VCC

Leading to the battery connector pins:
1 GND
2 GND
3 10k resistor to GND
4 VCC

I believe S-SW connects to a reset button for the kiosk? Shorting mine makes the console reset.

 

Thanks for the info aspect

The other day I was thinking about the 4 wires from the CATI-RELAY-01 board, which appears to 'intercept' signals from the consoles front panel to the main board. The Wii U's front panel has an FFC cable which includes connections for the power and eject buttons, and the power and disk LEDs. Knowing that the CATI-CTRL board possibly has access to these signals, I wondered if anything different would happen if I held down both the power and eject buttons at the same time, and well a few seconds later...

Unfortunately I cant seem to do anything once in this 'mode'

The consoles power light changes to orange, and it sort of reminds me of bootmii/boot2 in that it loads up almost instantly, even before the standard Wii U logo loading screen.

Although I cant do anything, perhaps you need to be in this mode in order to enable the sync function somehow? Pressing the sync button does not appear to do anything for me, but perhaps with a kiosk gamepad connected using the coaxial cable it might make a difference? Maybe even try testing the gamepads sync button aswell?

I would really appreciate any closeup photos of the extra kiosk gamepad PCB's I'm also curious to know if the RF board has a codename? (Like the DRCI-RELAY-01)