Is your Wii power supply broken?

I just got a brand new 40" LCD TV (which, by the way, is awesome) this morning and started testing it out. First the PC, then the Xbox 360, then the PlayStation, and finally I tried turning on my Wii and nothing happened. No lights, no sounds, nothing.

So, I started troubleshooting:

Check the connections to the Wii; looks good.
Change the surge protector socket it's plugged into; no change.
Reset the surge protector; still nothing.
Measured the voltage in the socket (any excuse to use my fancy new volt meter); a solid 110V.
Measured the voltage from the power supply; a solid 0V. Bingo.

At this point I was releived to find that my Wii was most likely not dead. This evening I started looking into repairing power supplies. I found a couple sites that gave me hope, so I decided to crack it open and see what I could find. That's when I discovered that my BX-100 bit set was missing the appropriate bit for the screws Nintendo used. Flabergasted, I found Chris Meyer's site which suggest just using needle-nose pliers. I found that wire snips actually worked best since I could grip the dimples easily with the sharp edges. The hardest part was actually popping apart the plastic pieces (I suggest a butter knife or a metal plaster spatula/scraper).

However, what's more interesting than his instructions are his results. He and I both found nothing wrong, put the brick back together, and then discovered it was magically working again. This could be a coincidence, but I think it's more likely that simply leaving the power supply unplugged for long enough allows it to reset.

With that, here is my suggestion if you find that your own Wii power supply has suddenly stopped working: before you tear it up trying to fix it, just unplug it and go outside to play instead. Maybe when you come back, it will love you again.

Bot Commander r1 Released

I just published Bot Commander , the code for my Lego NXT rover . There's a lot left to be done, but release early and often, right? Currently it provides a UI for controlling the direction and speed of all three motor ports on the NXT brick. You can link motors together to adjust their speed in unison. In addition, you can enable "Tilt Control" for a steering-wheel-type experience. To use tilt control: Hook up motor A and B to be the left and right wheels of your vehicle. Hold the phone sideways (i.e. landscape). Tilt the phone forward and backward to drive forward and backward. Turn the phone right and left (like a steering wheel) to steer right and left. As you tilt the phone, you'll see the UI update the slider controls for the speed of motors A and B. I plan to expand the UI to provide a lot more than just motor control. Before that, though, I'll push a JAR to make it easy to integrate control of Lego NXT robots into your own Android project. The code...

Email Injection

Not so long ago, I ran a wiki called SecurePHP. On that wiki, there was one particular article about email injection that received a lot of attention. Naturally, with all the attention came lots of spam. As a result, I disabled editing of the wiki and content stagnated. Still, the email injection article remained popular. About a year later, the server that hosted SecurePHP died and I never had a chance to hook it all back up. I saved the article though and I'm reposting it now. It may be a bit old (I've been away from PHP for a long time), and I didn't write all of it, so feel free to leave comments about needed updates and corrections. Though this article focuses on PHP, it provides a lot of general information regarding email injection attacks. The PHP mail() Function There are a lot of ways to send anonymous emails, some use it to mass mail, some use it to spoof identity, and some (a few) use it to send email anonymously. Usually a web mailform using the mail() funct...

XBee ZNet 2.5 Wireless Accelerometer

I managed to put together a wireless accelerometer the other night using my two new XBees, an Arduino XBee shield, an XBee Explorer USB, an ADXL330, and some Python. I struggled a bit with some of it, so here's what I learned: First, a parts list. XBee 2mW Series 2.5 Chip Antenna Arduino XBee (with XBee Series 2.5 module) XBee Explorer USB ADXL330 I'm not sure exactly what the specs are on the XBee that comes with the Arduino shield. But, it is definitely a series 2.5. The first thing to do is to configure and upgrade the firmware on your XBees. To do that, you'll need X-CTU (for the firmware upgrade at least, but it's also nice for configuration) which, unfortunately, is only available for Windows. But, it works fine from VMware. First up, the XBee we'll hook up to the computer to read incoming data from the accelerometer: Plug one of the XBees into the Explorer (it's also possible to do this from the Arduino shield by shifting the two XBee/USB jumpers to USB...

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