Question Wii USB Port issues

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Alright I've been doing some work on my Wii and have recapped it's video to get a nice big bright image as well as repaired the optical drive (which... I'd rather not get into... frustrations were had). But, there's one remaining issue I've yet to repair on my Adam Whii.

My USB ports appear to be rather unreliable. Near as I can tell, it's not an issue with the connector. Not only have I thoroughly cleaned both ports with some Deoxit and a nylon brush, I've added a little but of a "squeeze" to metal framing for a more solid connection and reflowed (in fact, sucked up and then completely resoldered) all the pins going from connector to board.

The ports do work occasionally, but never both at the same time. Plugging in an additional device will cause one to, it seems "turn off" leaving only one port active. That port will stay active for maybe a day or maybe a few hours but over long enough play will also turn off. I've used game loaders that rely exclusively on the SD Card as a result, since I can't rely on the USB ports themselves to stay active when a flash drive is plugged in. That said, all I'm using right now is Nintendo's own licensed microphone and network USB devices. This issue started happening before I'd even started hacking my unit so near as I can tell the failure point is just a component that aged too much.

Would anyone be able to inform me of a common point of failure on the USB ports? If I were to guess I'd assume it was another cap feeding the +5 running into it or maybe even the voltage regulator, but there's VERY little information I can find online in my usual haunts. It took some effort to even discover which caps to replace for restoring video but this forum provided. Any information from the pros here that seem extremely familiar with it's internals would be much appreciated!

Edit: I wasn't sure if this was the right forum for this, but since none of the others felt like the best fit, I put it here to be safe.
 

Stitches

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As matter of fact, the Wii is only able to use one USB device at a time. While you can have 2 drives connected for storing games and switch between them in some software (not recommended), you can't load from both at the same time. Using USB perpherals while running games from USB storage is also hit or miss, with great emphasis on miss.

Although, if your USB devices are randomly failing during play, that speaks to a different issue. What kind of drives are you using?
 
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I'm not using any drives currently. I'm using the Wiispeak microphone and the ethernet adapter, but currently only the ethernet adapter is plugged in, and yes, it's still intermittently turning off the device. It doesn't matter if I'm playing or not, as it fails even when in the base Wii menu while checking configuration. It will randomly report no detected device and I'll need to switch over to wifi.
 

Stitches

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In that case, I'm afraid I can't really speculate beyond that the USB host controller might be scuffed. And afaik that's part of the CPU chipset and can't be replaced or fixed.
 
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In that case, I'm afraid I can't really speculate beyond that the USB host controller might be scuffed. And afaik that's part of the CPU chipset and can't be replaced or fixed.
Dang... no chance it might be a power rail related issue?
 

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Dang... no chance it might be a power rail related issue?
Unsure. You could test it by chopping a USB extension cable and drawing 5v from another source, like a power bank or phone charger. Or even just buying a USB Y cable. If the problem persists with a clean outside supply, then it isn't the onboad reg
 
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Unsure. You could test it by chopping a USB extension cable and drawing 5v from another source, like a power bank or phone charger. Or even just buying a USB Y cable. If the problem persists with a clean outside supply, then it isn't the onboad reg
Thank you for the suggestion! I'll do just that (the latter) with an externally powered USB hub of some kind. Here's hoping.
 

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Thank you for the suggestion! I'll do just that (the latter) with an externally powered USB hub of some kind. Here's hoping.
USB hubs often don't play nice with the old and slightly odd USB protocol used by the Wii. It's absolutely worth a try, but don't be surprised if it gets even jankier or just fails outright
 
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