I don't know about any of those, but I have one question.
Why the hell are you using your minivan to power your Wii?
Do you even have electricity in your house?
Silly, the wii in the house gets powered by the house. The one in the car gets powered by the car. Duh.
Unless I'm supposed to take a REALLY long extension cord on our road trips... I didn't want to go into a tangent about my detailed vehicular entertainment system based on a wii housed under the third row of seats, and the whole video amplifier and second display up front under the dash for the front passenger, etc... none of that was relevant to this discussion. So I summed it up in the first sentence:
"I've been using my minivan's 110v inverter to run our Wii
in the car". Not at home. IN THE FRIGGIN CAR. Still with me? Good. Moving along...
I wouldn't do that, for one a nominally "12 V" lead acid battery is actually 13.8, but a generic vehicle's power system is far from clean (from noise and spikes) and stabilized
You will want a regulator and stabilizer (in fact, my car has one for the radio/nav - but it's the exception rather than the norm)... then stack one or more large capacitors in parallel between its output and the console: now we're talking!
About being afraid of touching the inverter "while driving", maybe you're right -
but for a rather different reason
Ha- ok, well, to be clear, Honda includes its own inverter as part of the vehicle. There's a factory 110v AC plug outlet right next to the AV inputs, which makes setting this up super simple. On a side note, between that and the wireless IR emitters for headphones acting like a sensor bar, its almost as if the Odyssey is begging for a wii installation.
But my plan was just to use it for video playback and light gaming on road trips (non sensor-bar based games like mario kart and brawl). I even came up with my own UI based on wiiflow that it boots into so that titles can be chosen graphically without any need to point to the screen.
But anyway, my point is: no one is touching the inverter. It is installed in the car as per factory specs and works well enough as is right now. My concern was having a kid unplug it from the outlet when it freezes and then plugging it back in, when there's a live 110v AC flow of current being inverted in front of their fingers. Sure, it would be just as dangerous as it would be at home, but I wouldn't encourage kids to do that at home either, especially when we COULD just be dealing with 12v DC instead. Also? I don't know the specifications of the Honda unit, but I know a lot of these inverters don't like sudden changes in draw. Like, unplugging something abruptly and plugging it back in might be putting unnecessary stress on the components it was not designed to do during usage. I don't know, that might just be my own paranoia. Also? It just seems super inefficient to be using the power this way, and can't be running in accessory mode since the AC plug is wired to only turn on when engine is on in Honda vehicles.
As far as spikes and/or regulated clean flow of power... I'm not sure how "unregulated" it is, or at least how much of a difference it would make in the real world. Remember, this same 12v supply from the vehicle already supplies power to both screens and a video amplifier (to make sure the signal is strong enough to drive both screens- it turns out just using a Y-splitter on the video cable made each screen darker when they were both on. I had to buy a cheap amp that is designed to power up to 4 displays to get 2 screens with their own unfettered video source so it wouldn't matter which screen or both were on). That cheapo video amplifier is designed to be tapped into the 12v power supply of the car directly. As is the screen I installed up front (it was designed for backup camera usage). Neither of them appear to have any kind of fancy shmancy regulators or stabilizers. In fact, I took apart the display because I wanted to see if I could power it off 5v instead of 12v, since I had a USB port behind the dash board from my bluetooth kit already available, but in the end I just went with the 12v direct connection.
Now, you could argue that those devices were "made" for the irregular unclean power supply from a car, and perhaps the Wii is not. But I'm under the impression that all DC electronics have some sort of range of acceptable power input, due to fluctuations even within the adapter. Please correct me if I'm wrong or missing something important in my understanding of the concepts here. If there's any reason to think the wii would be any worse off than any of the other components we are discussing, let me know. Or for that matter, if there would be any benefit to a "regulated" clean power supply when all the other components (amplifier, screens, etc) are not. Perhaps the stereo is, I'm not sure. I did notice that plugging in an aux while charging a music player when I first got the car did not give a ground loop hum on this vehicle whereas previous vehicles of mine DID with the same component setup. So maybe it has something cleaning up the stereo's power supply. I don't know enough about this to be certain either way, but you've given me a lot to think about. All I can say is my current setup seems good enough, I just want to make it better. If you're saying using the built-in inverter would be better than hard wiring it because of the unclean power, that's something for me to consider. I don't want to break a working setup. But I'm under the impression that everything here is somewhat of an erratic sourced power already anyway, so it probably won't be any worse than it currently is (which seems to be fine).
On that note, I could just get one of those extension cords with an on/off button and have that instead of the plug/unplug thing, and leave it as is otherwise. Just seems silly to be working off AC power in the car when everything here is DC based at the beginning and end of the chain.
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UPDATE: They do make car adapters for the Wii, that use the lighter/accessory DC port, and have the end that fits in the read of the Wii. I could buy one of those and then cannabalize the parts to wire it directly behind the plastic faring (I'm trying to hide wires and don't want more plugs sticking out), but I was under the impression that if I buy one and open it up, there will just be a pass through of the 12v DC power to the other end. Is there any reason to think there's some sort of regulation of the power going on in those things?