Hacking Chiip problem

[Bluntman]

Hi everyone!

After a few starting problems (like ripping off a soldering point), I finally got the Chiip (v5 beta , the "stable" one) running. I tested The Godfather, took my Wii into the living room and invited some friends. We played The Godfather for about an hour and eventually the chiip's led started to blink, but the game was still running properly. Before that, the led was just on like it was meant to be.

Anyway, after some playing we decided to test Medal of Honor, so I resettet the Wii (or returned to the menu, can't remember) an changed the discs. But to our suprise, the chiip started to give me blinkcodes!? We thought it may be a bad disc or whatever, so we inserted The Godfather again, but it didn't work anymore either.

At first, the chiip's blinkcode was SSSSSLSL (short / long) which stands for "Error while reading data - If this blinkcode occurs right after turning the Wii on, it most probably means there's something wrong with the connection of the O line.", according to the chiip's homepage.
However, after some connection-checking and chip-flashing, the blinkcode is now SSSSSSLS which means "Error while syncing - If this blinkcode occurs right after turning the Wii on, it most probably means there's something wrong with the connection of the I or C line." !?!?! (the blinkcode doesn't actually occur right after turning on, just some time after the disc-check. sometimes, the led was on after turning on the wii, sometimes not...)

I tested every single connection from the chiip's leg to the wii-dvd-chipset's leg for a few times, and they all seem to be correct!? What else could be the problem???

ps: sorry for the bad english, I'm from Germany...

 

[rrburkha]

try booting the system the case removed and without a game in the system (you'll probably need a screwdriver to hit the power and eject buttons)

i was having a similar problem and it turned out that when i put the case back on, it cut the O line.

 

[Smack]

It sounds like one of the wires to either your chip or your board has come loose. recheck your connections and that will most likely fix your problem.

 

[bliss-chris]

Hi Bluntman,

maybe your connections only look good, but have a rather poor soldering point. Did you try resoldering the wires to the console or did you merely have a close look? I don't know about your soldering skills, but when a soldering connection looks bad it's also likely to not work properly. Sometimes they work for a while but fail later on because of oxidization and/or mechanical strains (vibration, warmth, whatever) the connection becomes too high resistant. Try resoldering the connections to the Wii! Oh, I'm interested: how long are your Chiip connection cables leading out of the Wii?

 

[Frankdux]

post some pics of ur install... we can see what maybe wrong..

if your in canada, and u need it looked at let me know

 

[Bluntman]

Thanks for the quick replies!

My job is something like "radio-tv-engineer" (don't know the english name for it...), so my soldering skills should be ok I guess

BUT now that you mentioned it, I only checked the connection with that beep-thing (know what I mean??) on a multimeter - I totally forgot to check the resistances!
At first, my wires came out next to a gamecube controller's port (cut off a line??) and now they are coming out at the fan, but I had to solder some other wires to the original ones to make them long enough.

I'm almost certain that's the fault. I'll gonna check that tomorrow and post some pics here... I just hope I won't rip off another soldering point, soldering a single wire directly to the drive-chip was hard enough!!

 

[Bluntman]

OK I'm almost done now - in the way of being pissed off of that damn chiip!!!

First thing I did was resoldering all cables and shorten them, so that they didn't come out of the wii anymore. Instead, the chiip is now inside. That worked for about... hmm... 2 hours(?), when the chiip startet blinking again!!
Then I replaced the 5 cat5-wires with the 5-wired rest of an ide-cable. Suprise, the chiip's led was on! I went downstairs to get some games, talked with my sister for about 2 minutes an when I came back the led was already blinking!

I'll get a Wiikey Clone as soon as divineo.de gets them!!

ps: pics of my installation will follow, if anyone's still interested about this ongoing problem...

edit:

the OLD installation...

old installation, new chip placement...

 

[Bluntman]

To make it complete:
Today I spent again some time on resoldering the chip. I eventually got it running, but while playing Super Paper Mario, the led started to blink again...
any clues what could be the problem, or how to fix it? Don't know what to do anymore...

new ide-cable-soldering:

 

[eelw]

How about using the openWii firmware instead?

 

[bliss-chris]

Bluntman, your wiring and soldering looks perfectly fine. Maybe your ATMEL isn't okay? Do you have another chip to try out? But as eelw suggests, OpenWii may be a good choice. Also try the new latest FW 0.9.1, which is working perfectly fine for me. Flash it twice to the chip, for I've had the problem that the flashing didn't work properly, for the chip wouldn't work after the first flashing, but there was no error message on the DOS box.

I'm also wondering why it starting blinking during playing a game. Usually the chip shouldn't do much after giving the code to the drive. The LED is off for a few secs after inserting the DVD and turns on again and stays on. Any ideas anybody?

 

[Bluntman]

Hmmm, I don't think it's the chip because I have 3 ATMELS here with 3 different version (beta 1 v5 (stable), v0.9.0 and v0.9.1) and it's the same with every chip. But on the other side, how possible is it for the "i"-wire (the one which is soldered directly to the drive-chip) to get disconnected by warming or vibrations? I mean, it is definitely connected, but only by 1 or 2 thin wires...

Anyway, since I've more than one chip, I'll try OpenWii and FreeWii (if thats your "FW", Bliss-Chris?)... isn't OpenWii or FreeWii using another ATMEL chip? Do I have to swap any wires, and may I use my Chiip-Programmer???

edit:
where do I get the FreeWii firmware?? can't find anything with google...

edit 2:
just resoldered the "i"-line, so I was able to play again - for 15 minutes! then it started blinking again!!!

strange thing that is...

edit 3:
it gets even more mysterious: I thought the wii would be unable to read backups if the chiip is blinking. BUT: If I'm already in a game (spm) and the wii has to load data from the dvd (like when I proceed to the next level), there's no problem. I can actually hear the pickup in the drive moving back and forth, reading data...
If I'm back in the menu, however, the Wii refuses to accept any backups. I doesn't even recognize the disc which was running a minute ago!!

I also covered the whole leg of the drive-chip with a wire, leading to the "i"-line of the chiip. It's almost impossible to detach due to vibrations or warming or whatever!!

@bliss-chris:
I tried OpenWii 2.1b, but it didn't work. The LED was on all the time, the drive speeded up when I inserted a backup but then it stopped spinning.
I guess FW doesn't stand for FreeWii but WiiFree? As far as I understand, it needs a different chip, doesn't it??

 

[Frankdux]

what kinda solder are you using, any flux past used...

Try soldering 'I' to a different point.

it almost sounds like a cold solder spot.... almost..

 

[Bluntman]

Try soldering 'I' to a different point.

What different point? The problem is, I ripped of the original point for "i". That's why I had to solder it directly to the drive chip. Haven't seen any alternative points, did you?
If it's a cold solder, wouldn't it be impossible to work in the first place? Now that you mention it, the wire isn't actually "melted" or "fusioned" with the drive-chips leg, it more like... attached to it. But it obviously had a connection, otherwise the chip would even start I think...

 

[bliss-chris]

@ Bluntman:

"FW" stands for firmware, so I just meant use the latest version of the Chiip "software".

I know nothing about FreeWii, so I can't help you there.

As for the bad (or so called "cold") soldering connections, I still wouldn't completely rule out this option. I've seen it too often: a perfectly fine looking connection, but whether it works or not depends on the wheather or the colour of your tshirt.

And you usually get mad finding a bitch like that. If the wire is nicely connected to the chip, then what about the connection to your Atmel or maybe it's a broken cable? But I'm pretty sure you checked that often enough already... but something like has got to be the problem! There's no essential fault in your design, buildup or something else, because it's working sometimes, but not very stable.

I also haven't tried OpenWii myself, but a friend of mine (we built our Chiips together, isn't that true friendship?

) tried it and told me it's running smoothly. He also told me that there's two versions of the OpenWii FW for the 2 different DVD controller chipsets. If you got the wrong FW for your controller, it just won't work and nothing happens, so you can try it out without any risk. That's what happened to him, he first got the wrong version and had no functionality. Then he tried the other one and it worked. Maybe that's one more option for you? I'm keeping my fingers crossed... but as I said before, I doubt that this is the problem at all.

 

[Bluntman]

Probably my last update, probably it's better that way...

I resoldered every connection, checked every connection (all < 1 Ohm, if my multimeter works right), flashed everyone of my 3 ATMELs 3 times with 3 different firmwares and 2 different avr-softwares. And hey, there's a difference now!

-> The LED blinks twice as fast now!!

WTF!??????

I guess it has something to do with the clock frequency/speed, which I didn't change as far is I know...
Now I gotta wait till a proper modchip comes out or some kind of firmware-hack via usb or sd-card or whatever. At least my Wii is still working alright... THANK YOU, CHIIP!!!!

 

[RobertsD]

Hmm, I've never heard of anything like this!

I've installed over 20 Chiips, and all have worked perfectly. Whether using the Chiip firmware, or Using the Openwii firmware.

One thing, did you use the setup disc to set the region for the openwii firmware.? Without that, it won't play backups.

 

[Bluntman]

Yeah, I absolutely don't get it either...
But I never heard of any backup disc. I thought the Chiip and OpenWii firmware are more or less the same, so the only thing I did was patching the region of spm with the region-patcher-tool. I'll look out for that disc, but I doubt that it would solve the problem... it's just too strange for an "easy" solution like that

 

[zosh]

But I never heard of any backup disc. I thought the Chiip and OpenWii firmware are more or less the same

They are doing the same, but internally they work quite differently. Not "backup disk", but rather "setup disc". It is a bit unfortunate that the OpenWii pages would not direct you to those disks anymore. You can find them at http://www.openwii.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=707#707
An OpenWii 2.x chip won't do anything (i.e.: it will not tamper with the Wii, so only originals will work) without having been set up to a region using this disk.

 

[Bluntman]

I accidentely swapped O and C connections...
After fixing that, the chip worked with OpenWii firmware for about an hour of playing, now it refuses to take any backups at all, again.

Can't help myself but I still think it has something to do with the I-wire which I had to solder directly to the chip. It really ain't loose at all, but I can't imagine anything else than the wire losing connection due to warmth or vibration. However, when I checked the wire after a "breakdown" I could almost pull the wire without detaching it from the drive-chip.
Any ideas how I could fix it really strong to the chip? I have no trust in the soldering anymore, I thought maybe duct tape could do the job...