Extend Your Own Sensor Bar - Page 3

Yep.

so my 2nd sensor bar should be here today and i'm wanting to do the hard wired plug-in adapter hack. some questions:

are we in agreement that the power adapter from jeremy's post is a good one to use for longer range front projection setups? i'm at about ~13-14' back.

also if i want to eliminate the need for solder, can i simply cut the plug off of the adapter and use crimp style butt connectors instead? or is there enough lead on the tip of that adaptaplug (273-1742) to insert into a crimp butt connector? it's hard to tell from the picture. i guess i could solder, but i'm being lazy.

lastly, can someone confirm that this setup will allow me to stand about ~13-14' back no problem from a 92" diag screen?

i tried the 9-volt battery hack and while it works well, the battery doesn't last too long. i forgot to unplug it the other day and after 24 hours my reception distance decreased by quite a bit, almost half. i don't want to have to keep buying 9-volt batteries obviously.

thanks again for the replies.

/edit, oh and one more thing, this may seem dumb, but do you actually have to set the voltage on that adapter?

I tried several times to get my splice working with just butt connectors and wasn't able to get it working. The little cable is SO thin that some fine soldering might be the only way to go. If you screw up, you're only out $10

were you able to finally get it to work with solder? how's the range? did you use the same power adapter jeremy lists?

any tips on stripping the sensor bar wire?

Why strip the sensor bar wire? Why not simply connect the battery / power converter to the sensor bar connector?

That's a great idea - some third party should sell a portable power pack with an input for the sensor bar. But I guess if you went thru that trouble you may as well just create a standalone sensor bar with no wires...

On the 9V battery thread - that's exactly what some people have done - by jamming trimmed down pieces of pencil into the connector. I think I'm going to try this first (but with an adapter).
We don't have a Nintendo online store in the UK, so getting spare sensor bars might be more tricky.

bump

I was unable to get my splice working even with soldering
I'd order a new sensor bar from nintendo for $10 but what's the point until extension cables are available.

how about some tips for soldering jeremy?

I would think that if you just strip enough of the wires on both sides and just twist them around each other (then make sure you wrap each with insulating tape so that the 2 wires don't touch) you should be ok. It's just DC power.

i just got a spare sensor bar from nintendo today so i could do the DC wall wart mod so i could finally put the wii in the theater closet at the back of the room (front projector here, too.)

i started with a fixed 6V / 800mA brick and could not get that working. knowing that digicams see IR was quite helpful; i left my digicam pointing at the sensor bar so i could see the LEDs come on. just touching the bare wires to the contacts of a 9V battery got them to light up, but it was not easy -- i had to tin the wires a bit with solder first. maybe that just melted off a coating.

i couldn't get it working with the 6V brick, and finally gave up and returned it and got jaremy's suggestion, the variable voltage 2000mA one and set it at 7.5V. but it still didn't work, and i think it was just tricky to solder. those wires on the sensor bar are so thin it's really finicky. i don't think you could just twist them around each other. i just kept working my way down with the 9V battery -- first touching it to the bare wires, then soldering them and touching it to the solder to make sure that was making contact, then touching to the pins on the other side of the power lead cable, and once that worked, plugging it into the wall wart worked.

it's so much nicer having it neatly up at the front, sensor bar on top of center speaker, excess cable hidden behind the speaker, little DC brick right against the outlet a foot away. thanks for doing the voltage testing and all that for me!

I think one of the problems is that with wires this thin it's very common for them to be coated in a transparent sheath - makes soldering really difficult - even my local electrical fixit shop has trouble with these. I'll ask him if he's got any tips.

so would taking a lighter to the end being of any help? get it really hot and then maybe wipe with a paper towel? i'm hesitant to go spend $30 on that adapter when people have had such a discouraging time getting this to work. i guess it is possible, but can take some time to get it right. right?

is there any special type of solder i need? just something very thin? i'm going to go there today.

I've just picked mine up, but I've got some urgent work to do.
I'm as worried as you are Billymac - therefore I'm going to try the 'matchsticks in the connector' mod first. This leaves the bar/cable/connector intact. I've got a multi-voltage transformer I'm going to use - if that doesn't work I'll try a 9v battery.

Those of you who are having issues with soldering should try the butt connectors mentioned in my 9V battery variation of JaremyP's approach. Just substitute the DC power source for the 9V leads and you should be good to go. Stripping the tiny wires is a bit tricky, but connecting the leads within the butt connectors with a crimp is a snap--I think this is much easier than soldering (which I tried, unsuccessfully, and I do have prior soldering experience).

Cheers,

KK

Quick question about attaching a power supply to the sensor bar. I just rec'ed my 2nd sensor bar from the big N. I plan on placing a powersupply on it. The only power outlet close is directly behing the tele.

Does anyone have any opinions on leaving the sensor bar pluged in all the time?

Think THIS will work for the sensor bar? Alittle cheaper still than the Radio shack one mentioned earlier

FYI, I found that the quickest way to check the bar for power is with a cell phone camera.

Yup, I was wrong, you can't just twist them around, you have to solder them. I guess there's some kinda coating around the wires. So I ended up splicing in a 30' long length of small speaker cable. Works great!

Just so people know what they are getting into before they go snip snip, here's some pics.

and a last one after the splice

I see a lot of you are having trouble soldering these wires, there is a coating on them that prevents shorting. You need a soldering iron that gets to 700+ degrees to melt through this stuff easily. The little radio shack ones probably won't work well. I used one of my Weller pro irons at work and had no trouble. You may be able to melt the coating off with a lighter or torch first if you don't have a good iron.

Jeff

okay, so i did it today first try. i bought the two parts listed in jeremy's post. about ~$34 with the little lead. i was able to get it right the first time and i'm a total noob when it comes to soldering. i cut the plug end of the wire about 10" up. that never does not feel weird by the way. anyway, then i stripped off the outer shielding and then split the two wires apart. then i took a lighter and carefully burned off the outer coating. take extra care not to let it burn to far. it will run so be very careful. then i took a knife sharpener out of our wood block and used my thumb to drag each wire over the sharpener. this will clean up the wires and remove any carbon from the burn or anything else still stuck on there (you could use fine sand paper too i imagine). your wires should look shiny by the time your through. it doesn't take long. then i simply went for it. i had a little spring loaded clip that came with my iron and i simply held each end together on the correct wire of the lead and dabbed some solder on the joint. plugged it in making sure the two wires weren't touching and turned on my camera phone. ka-bam!! lights! unplugged it, taped it up and i'm good to go. piece of cake. thanks to everybody who pioneered this. this is super handy for me. now i just have to remember to unplug it.

Just in case anyone is intersted, I was able to break apart the sensor bar adaptor/plug itself and solder directly to power lead and then placed a heat shrink over the whole connection.
Soldering directly to the gold connectors was easy wors perfectly

Thanks for this great solution

@Scott Farkis
How did you break apart the plug? It look like you need to squeeze two pins with something pretty small.

I cut my sensor bar wire last night (to extend it) before reading on the net. Oops. As others have found, you can't just twist the red and orange wires to an extension line.

I'm curious why the sensor bar wires are the way they are. It looks like the red and orange are in contact with each other. Shouldn't that prevent it from working? I guess the reason it works is the thin coating others have had to melt off the copper. Why are both wires twisted together with strands of nylon?

great tip about the plug. never actually thougth about trying to break it down.

if you did cut and are having trouble though, all you have to do is carefully melt off the coating on the wires and then sand them clean. piece of cake. if i can do it, ANYbody can do it.

So does this mean you can't get accuracy on a large screen because the sensor is too small or just that the console has to be near the screen because of a short wire?

I too would love to know how you managed to take apart the plug. Sounds MUCH easier than the soldier the wires method

I found soldering the original wires easy. The conductors are coated, much like windings in a transformer. Luckily enough the stuff melts away when you solder it. It's very fine and you need to be careful, but its far from impossible.

I cut the sensor bar wire and attached an RJ12 phone lead cut in half in the middle so that I could run the sensor bar over a CAT5 run I already had running from near my screen to the cupboard where my Wii is.

I now want to replace the sensor bar with LEDs mounted into my screen's frame, one so that it's neater and two so that I can use the remote from further back. Rayman Raving Rabbids complains when I am more than about 2M from the sensor bar. I assume it figures this out by measuring the distance between the LEDs on the sensor bar. I'm hoping that if I space the LEDs out about 1.5 times the length of the original bar I should be able to get back to my couch without it complaining.

Does anyone have a diagram (with resistor values) of what's in the genuine sensor bar so that I can replicate it? ie. Run my replacement off the Wii without woe...

if I already have an IR up in the front for my other stuff do I even need the sensor bar or will it work of that IR (house is not finished yet or I would check my self of course)