Converting an old Wii into an M1 Mac mini was the BEST IDEA

this is an M1 Mac Mini and I think most of us would agree that it's one of the best deals that you can find in all of computing essentially but I think we'd also agree it's a little boring this design has been around for more or less a decade and I mean it's fine what more could you want it's a little square that sits on your desk but this is the Luciana YouTube channel and so if you think I'm just gonna sit here content with this well now not even close [Music] today's video is sponsored by pulseway imagine having the power to remotely control any of your systems wherever you are walking the dog grocery shopping on a date or out hiking pulseway has got you covered pulseway's all-in-one it monitoring and management system can turn you into the ultimate one-person I.T hero troubleshoot remotely manage run scripts or simply send commands to any of your systems from the device closest to you you don't need to pack all your laptops and servers on any road trips anymore simply install pulseway and have the time of your life while having complete control over all it systems and the best part you can try it free by checking out the link in the description below there's no credit card or other commitment required you just have to try pulse way today and step your it game up so a big thanks to them for sponsoring and now let's get back into the video so as you might be able to guess when my mind comes up with a little idea of saying hey Mac Mini inside of Wii there is very little that I am physically capable of doing that would prevent me from from just trying it now that's not to say that it's a bad idea because I mean when you look at these two things they are kind of similar sure the Mac Mini is a little bit taller but the width is about the same the thickness is about the same and one of my favorite things about the Wii is that it has these trapdoors on top where you can plug in your controllers so wouldn't it be nice if you put the rear i o of the Mac Mini right over here and then you could just use the i o and if you don't need it you could close it up how perfect would that be so what more do you want I mean they're shaped kind of the same the Mac Mini is a little taller so maybe some stuff's not going to fit but when has that stopped me so yeah let's do this thing First Step well we gotta tear down this Wii to see if this is even physically possible [Music] foreign [Music] fortunately when you actually take all the guts out of a Wii the case fits back together pretty easily which means that we should be able to screw everything together with a Mac Mini inside instead the Mac Mini for its part is very very simple with just about a dozen screws holding this entire device together I fix its electronics repair bundle which happens to be on sale through all of November has everything you need from the T6 and T8 screw bits to picks and sponges that definitely help in some of those hard to reach areas iFixit is a long time sponsor of the channel and I use their stuff every day so now with the Mac Mini torn down the parts list includes the shell the plastic bottom cover the metal antenna plate the logic board itself the power supply and the fan so to fit the guts of the Mac Mini inside the Wii enclosure we're going to need to make some modifications there's just no way we're going to fit this massive power supply and bulky fan inside the tiny Wii enclosure with this in mind I can assemble a list of requirement it's first we're going to need a smaller fan to keep temperatures from getting too high second I'm going to need to make a new power supply third I decided it would be a good idea to run HDMI out the back of the Wii because having to plug it in from the top defeats the purpose of using the controller covers to hide the ports and with those requirements in mind I started making some modifications to the case first the coin cell battery tray had to be glued down so it wouldn't fall out all the time next I needed to fix the mechanisms that allow the controller doors to stay shut because those are on an internal frame that we removed so I use some snipping tools to trim down these tiny clips that screwed back into their original holes and let the doors shut next I had to grind away the top of the case where the controller ports are molded out of the plastic to make room for the Mac Mini's i o so with the case modded it was now time to figure out a solution for our power supply now fortunately I benefited from working with Quinn from snazzy Labs who already modded his Mac Mini and provided the pin outs for the power supply connection so we opened up the Mac minis dramatically unnecessary 150 watt power supply so we could isolate the connector after double checking everything with a multimeter here's what we came up with six of the wires bundled in green are the positive 12 volt line and the black is our ground and then there are a couple more wires that are not connected to anything so they don't really need to be hooked up at all we hooked this contraption up to a buck converter and checked if the system worked and surprisingly it did so now we gotta figure out how to power the thing initially I wanted to use USBC to make things easier this is literally just coming off of two alligator clips directly into a PD board oh man but while it did power on there were issues with voltage and getting a clean signal plus we wanted to keep the Wii look as stock as possible so I had an idea we already had the Wii power socket that we pulled off the board so why not just use that the Wii power supply is 12 volts at 53 Watts so under most cases it should have enough power to run a humble Mac Mini right well with the Wii PSU plugged into the Wii socket wired up to a buck converter wired up to the Mac Mini's wiring harness it powered on but there was a problem 53 Watts wasn't enough for the Mac Mini to be happy under Peak load so it was throttling its performance very heavily so instead I snipped the end of the Wii charger off and wired it up to a Microsoft Surface charger with plenty of wattage for us to use alright I'm really really excited about this because I am now at the point in this project where I've Got The Power delivery system more or less figured out so a couple of things have changed number one I ended up getting a buck converter that has some pretty big heat sinks on it uh that's going to help with some of the issues that I had with the old ones that got really really hot and another issue that I was also having was the Mac Mini was getting really really hot because we don't have room for its original cooling fan so the solution to that is I picked up this tiny little 12 volt fan which happens to be the exact dimensions of the original cooling fan for the Wii all of this is to say that we have created a beautiful Monster on this end here we have a surface charger which I have spliced into the original Power connector for the Wii that connects over here to the buck converter which fires up the 12 volt fan that's on constantly and it's going to provide some airflow to hopefully keep things pretty cool that then goes into the Mac Mini we can power on the Mac Mini there it goes so now what we have to do is put all of this together [Music] we have a modified Wii chassis we have a modified Power delivery solution but we have to put all of these things together so that meant learning how to 3D print a bracket to mount the Mac Mini inside the Wii and this being my first time 3D printing I will admit it took a fair amount of prototypes to get this working but I finally settled on this design and I'm very happy with how it came out because basically the holes on this Square are designed to fit perfectly over the screw posts on the Wii housing you don't need to screw them in or glue this thing down It just fits with friction then there are two standoffs poking out of this thing which allow me to screw the Mac Mini logic board onto this guy and they're positioned to take advantage of that ribbon cable you might have seen well that is a very thin HDMI extension so there's an L-shaped plug that plugs into the Mac Mini and then we run the cable underneath this bracket and out the back of the Wii and then finally this bracket has a rectangular hole which allows me to fit a fan in there now granted I did have to chop the top of the housing off to get it to actually fit in the case but we do have some amount of cooling now so in addition to printing that bottom bracket I also so printed this ingenious little guy it doesn't look like much and it's not very well made because I'm not good at 3D printing however basically all you have to do is double side tape this down where the power socket should be and it holds it in place without needing any glue or tape so when you assemble the weed together you can plug stuff in and the power port will just stay where it is I'm actually pretty happy with how that came out I don't mean to toot my own horn here but that was pretty cool okay so now everything is assembled here we have the charger let's go ahead and plug that in the fan starts up right away we'll hit the power button here there it goes nice I have to say I'm really pleased with how this came out but there is still one issue I would like to solve if you look really closely you'll notice that our connection really isn't very good and that's because the Mac Mini has three antenna bands two of which are on the logic board itself but unfortunately the third antenna is on this metal bottom plate and this just is not going to fit now I could destroy this bottom plate and take the antenna out and plug it in here but I kind of don't want to destroy this because I want to be able to reassemble the Mac Mini so I have another plan this is one of the original antennas from the Wii and wouldn't you know it the connector is exactly the same as what the Mac Mini uses can we improve the responsiveness of our Bluetooth accessories and increase the Wi-Fi speeds well to find out let's get a baseline reading so before even starting the test it's very apparent that the mouse is having trouble connecting over Bluetooth it's jumping it's stuttering it's not even really usable in my opinion now the Wi-Fi does work and it actually works fairly well so we got 270 megabits per second download however when we plug in the antenna pulled from the Wii things change dramatically first of all you can instantly tell the difference in responsiveness from the mouse and keyboard it just works perfectly and when we start the speed test you can see that we're jumping up from 279 to well over 400 megabits per second so with all this sorted out we now have a fully operational Mac Mini inside a Wii housing all we have to do is close this thing up and make it nice and Polished [Music] this is easily my favorite project that I've ever done on this channel I'm absolutely Blown Away with how everything turned out here I mean normally when I do this type of project it ends up being a little janky and let's be honest impractical when I put a Mac Mini inside an iMac it prevented you from using any of the ports but this this is like the most perfect beautiful creation that I've ever come up with we have power running through the original Wii power socket we have an HDMI that comes out the back to maintain this slim we aesthetic we even have full access to the ports with the the doors on top everything works exactly as it should it's beautiful and I absolutely love it okay but in all seriousness the two things that I am most surprised about are the two things that I had to change away from stock the power supply and the fan now it's no secret that the M1 Mac minis 150 watt power supply and huge blower fan are complete Overkill you don't need that but I'm very surprised at how well my substitutions have worked this crazy Contraption of the surface charger wired to the Wii power port wired to a buck converter wired to the Mac Mini's wiring harness Works flawlessly I've had no issues with power delivery whatsoever and the other thing that I'm really surprised about is that fan you would imagine going from this big bulky fan with lots of airflow down to a tiny little static RPM 12 volt fan with half of its housing sawed off that you'd probably miss out a lot in terms of thermals but no now obviously the M1 chip doesn't produce a ton of heat so you could just leave it fanless but if you do that what I noticed is very quickly temperatures are going to climb all the way up to 100 degrees Celsius at which point the system has to Thermal throttle and the result of that is you lose a decent chunk of your performance however this 12 volt fan even though it's just providing a tiny little amount of airflow it really really goes a long way in keeping the system cool and while it does get hotter than the stock fan would allow it's not unreasonable and if you take a look at these performance comparisons you'll notice you're only losing a couple of percent going with this tiny little 12 volt fan versus the stock system so I feel perfectly comfortable using this machine with this implementation that's pretty crazy so there you have it a fully operational Mac Mini inside a Wii it's not only one of the most awesome projects I've ever worked on but it's also arguably pretty useful because Apple still silicon is really really good at emulating older game consoles especially the Wii so of course I had to install Dolphin and hook this thing up to my TV and place a Mario Kart Wii on it and oh my God this is the moment that this whole project just clicked racing around some of my favorite Wii Mario Kart tracks while staring at the Wii that it would have originally run on but it's running in 4k on a 75 inch 16x9 TV that is honestly one of the most incredible things I've ever witnessed and it's not just Wii games either I fired up Mario Kart Double Dash from the GameCube that runs perfectly additionally The Legend of Zelda the windmaker that ran pretty darn well again all of these are being upscaled to resolutions that you would never dream of playing those games on and it looks like you're running it on a Wii I can't stress that enough but it's not just Nintendo games because Apple silicon also happens to be really really good at emulating the PlayStation 2. so I fired up Midnight Club 3 w Edition Remix one of my all-time favorites from back in the day and soon enough I'm blasting around San Diego in a blue golf R32 just like back in the mid-2000s this is honestly one of the best things that I think you could do with a Mac Mini to turn it into a really cool Retro Gaming device that looks like a retro gaming console and yeah sure you could just have the boring old Mac Mini on your TV stand and do all of this same stuff but it's just a little bit more special when you're playing a Wii game while looking at a Wii so this is like the best project ever I absolutely loved it I think it was a ton of fun I learned soldering I learned 3D printing I bought a grinder and I will leave links to all of the stuff that I used in today's video from the iFixit guides to taking apart your Mac Mini to the Protec toolkit that you can take it apart with shout out to iFixit for sponsoring I'll leave links down below to the schematics for the 3D printed parts that I used in this build anything that I can think of it's down there thank you guys so much for watching this video I had a ton of fun I can't wait to do more fun stuff with Mac Minis and with you guys so make sure to like comment and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 706,992

Keywords: Mac mini, apple, tech, wii, vintage gaming, diy, project, console, Mac, apple silicon, Mac mini conversion

Id: 4qOCjH2T7HQ

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022