WiiLi.org

[V!NCENT]

@TheDro:

I am very, very interested in the knowledge you will gather from what you are going to do You seem like a very knowledgeable guy/sir.

Could you please tell me, after you made your censorbar, what I need to do in order to be able to plug a official Nintendo censorbar into a computer? That is without frying it lol

Thanks in advance!

[T-nm]

A usb is 5volts.

Molex [RED][BLACK1][BLACK2][YELLOW]

RED and BlACK1 is 5v
YELLOW and RED is 7v
YELLOW and BLACK2 is 12v

[V!NCENT]

@t-nm:
I am not planning on creating a casemod I want it to be able to connect to my laptop as well.

[TheDro]

Has anybody measured the voltage on the wii sensor bar output when there is a know resistance connected to it yet? It would be good to know. And are both black wires of the usb port you are talking about grounds? I don't understand why there would be two black wires unless they are both connected to each other (and the ground of course).

Edit: I got my 10 LEDs on friday and I just finished testing one out and it works (yay!). It seems like the company from whom I bought the LEDs didn't supply me with a very exhaustive data sheet so unfortunately I can't make a perfect circuit. I don't have soldering tools so I'll have to do it at school but I made a mini circuit with one AA battery (NiMH) a 10 ohm resistor and one LED to test it.

The actual circuit I plan on making is 2 AA batteries in series, one 10 Ohm resistor and 6 LEDs in parallel. The Voltage of each battery is between 1.2V and 1.4V and so the current should vary between 20mA and 26.6mA based on the datasheet I found. The datasheet says that at 1.2V, one LED will have a current of 20mA btw.

P.S. Don't connect a battery directly to an LED because as I've mentioned before, a small variation in voltage will make a huge difference in current and the specs for the LEDs I bought say that the maximum forward current is 50mA. A quick calculation reveals that theoretically, if the voltage supplied to my LED is 1.4V instead of 1.2V, the current is multiplied by 3000 or 55 depending on variable n.

[TheDro]

double post
I've finally built my "sensor bar". I used 6 LEDs in parallel (3 on each side) with 2 AA NiMH batteries and a 15 or 10 ohm resistor. It's not the best looking thing but it definitely works. I've simply used paper clips to hold the perforation boards to my laptop screen. I might add some picture later on.

As for V!ncent's question, if I suppose the LEDs in the nintendo sensor bar are the same as the ones I used, they should need 20mA at 1.2V and both bunches of 5 LEDs are in parallel and the individual LEDs are in series within the packs of five. This requires a voltage of 6V and 0.04A from the source. This means you need more than 6 volts. If you're using the 12V usb wire as a source and supposing the internal resistance in negligible, you should approximately need a 120 Ohm resistor connected to your source. If you follow the wire in this circuit you have: 12V source(T-nm says the yellow wire), 150 ohm resistor, nintendo sensor bar, ground(always the black wire, both should be the same).

Good luck and if you have more questions, just PM me or post something in the forum.

EDIT: here are the pictures, the first one is with the leds turned off, and the second is with the leds turned on(hopefully this works).




By tdro at 2008-03-27

[Isindil]

I've been more or less "planning" to make a wireless sensor bar for maybe a year or so now, but I never really got around to doing it. Today I found the "small, fancy electric things"-box, and tried to at least learn how to properly use resistors with LEDs, and after a little while I susuccessfully made a very basic circuit like the one in the image a bit down. If someone knows how to calculate what resistor(s) to use when several LEDs are used, I'd like to know.


Anyway, my actual question. Does anyone know of an online store that sells IR LEDs and ships worldwide? I live in Norway, and the pseudo-RadioShack we've got here doesn't sell IR LEDs. Of course, if someone "happens" to have a few (i.e. 2 or 4) spare, and also "happens" to want to mail them to me, I'd be happy to, uh, recieve. Though I dunno how to pay for that, as I don't have a PayPal-account or similar.



Edit: Another question, does it matter in what direction the resistor is facing?

Edit2: Yet another question. The link below is to a .pdf with specs for an IR LED I found. When I'm looking for forward voltage and forward current, is that 1,3 and 16. respectively?

[TiagoTiago]

this is probably what you're looking for: http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz (it also tells you the more common forward voltage and current for each type of led)

as for the direction of the resistor, afaik, it doesn't matter (just remeber that not all eletronic components won't break if you put them backwards and power on the ciruit)
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