Mod: Wii Sensor Bar with USB power supply

Friday, 14 July 2017

My Wii Sensor Bar is built of two arrays of IR-LED that get its power from a proprietary port on the Wii / WiiU. Since I have a beamer as second screen with its own Sensor Bar, a Wii-to-HDMI-Adapter and a 4x2 HDMI switch I don't want to unplug and reconnect the sensor bar cable anymore when I switch from one screen to the other.

My idea: connect one sensor bar to the USB port of the TV, and the other one to the USB port of the beamer, so both will only be enabled when the specific screen is in use. Another reason to get power from an external power supply could be that you have both, a Wii and a WiiU.

So, I've tried to find out what current and amperage the sensor bar requires, and since I did not find any reliable information I've took a screwdriver, my multimeter and had a look at it.

Program Arduino Pro Mini with CP2102 USB module

Friday, 24 March 2017

When I ordered a bunch of Arduino Pro Mini clones I didn't notice that these don't come with an integrated USB-to-Serial adapter (in fact I needed Arduino Nano - well, I was relative new into this).

So to get a change to use them I've also ordered a CP2102 board that converts between USB and TTL. Since it took a while for me to figure out how to use that I will document it here.

First, connect the CP2102 with the Arduino:

KDE: Remove "Switch User" and "Start New Session" from Plasma's lockscreen

Monday, 13 March 2017

If you are the only user on your workstation you probably do not have any need for the "Start New Session" button on Plasma's lockscreen. Quite the contrary it's extremly anoying if you just wanted to unlock your session and accidentally created a new one instead.

These is no UI switch to disable this button but you can use the KDE Action Restrictions for this. Just append the following lines to your "$HOME/.config/kdeglobals" (or "$HOME/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals") and login again:

[KDE Action Restrictions][$i]
action/switch_user=false
action/start_new_session=false

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