On the east coast for a business trip last week, I got a call from my despondent son. "Dad, the cat ate the wire from the sensor bar on my Wii."That really sucked, because the wire is super thin and although I told him I could fix it, I had my doubts about being able to solder the skinny little things together without screwing up the impedance and signal integrity in the wire. Considering how hard these things are to come by, I figured it would be almost impossible to get a replacement part any time soon.
When I started looking into the problem of a broken sensor bar, I found web sites discussing work arounds for the sensor bar - mostly from projection tv gamers who can't deal with the limited wire length (a shortcoming of the product - pun intended). The most interesting approach substituted a pair of candles for the sensor bar. This youtube video captured this setup working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZxwBrCAtUE
I tried it myself and voila! it worked. My son was back in bliss, playing with a couple tea candles burning on the top of the TV like an altar decoration. Here's the deal. The sensor bar does not sense anything at all - instead it is a pair of infrared emitters (actually a pair of IR LED clusters). The Wii controller gets its location information from its position relative to those IR sources and then transmits that information to the console over its wireless connection. I made a couple sloppy solder joints to fix the wire and get power back to the sensor bar.
That's probably enough about gaming. I'll get back to storage now.
