I've made a Piratebox out of a Wii! (a teaser for something which should hopefully be released soon, maybe?
)
I've got the Wii you're looking at from a job lot a while ago. While I was able to make fully working consoles to resell out of the lot, I've noticed that it would've taken a serious amount of effort with this one due to small defects in the motherboard (for example, the previous owner somehow completely f'd up one of the USB ports) as well as a lack of spare parts (mainly missing BT module & Wi-Fi antennas, plus I didn't have a working drive to put in it). So I've just kept it around as a beater to experiment with stuff, especially with Wii Linux.
A while ago I've discovered
Piratebox and not only I liked the project but I thought it'd be perfect to own one down at my garage where there's no internet connection (not even via cellular data, reception is pretty hit or miss) and sometimes I go there with my IRL friends to watch movies, play RPGs/board games, etc... the usual nerdy stuff, so a way to share files locally would be great. So I remembered about the beater Wii, how it can indeed run a fully fledged Debian system and all and said "Why not?"
So I got working, managed to install and configure everything needed for Piratebox to run, added some antennas (an internal one from an old D-Link router and a u.FL to RP-SMA adapter), swapped the propietary AC connector with a more standard plug (so I could resell the Wii power brick as well as using a more efficient power supply), added a dummy Wii DVD drive board (wii-linux-ngx kernels will go into a boot loop if they don't find a DVD drive board) and printed a honestly not so stunning logo for extra street cred, which is probably going to get swapped for an official one to show some support to the original project.
And now it works!
It's honestly VERY slow in file transfers for several reasons but it's still fine for small files (and I don't see me or my friends sharing big files over it, especially considering that I'm going to hook up a small 8 GB USB drive to it) but it's been fun building it, and plus it also has been a zero budget project (everything I've used has been taken from random junk I've had laying around or previously bought stuff).
I'm not going to show you the internals tho, as that's probably every electrical engineer's nightmare.