Unbrick your Wii U with a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico

pcgamer.com:

Though it feels like a blip in the history books, 11 years ago Nintendo released a little console called the Wii U. It had a large controller with a screen in it so you could play through the TV and was positioned to be the successor to the wildly popular Wii. Be it due to the confusing name or lack of 3rd party support the Wii U didn't take the world by storm. Though its DNA is prominent in the incredibly successful Switch console which took over the Nintendo mantle, and most of the Wii U's best games just four years later. 

The problem with a console like the Wii U is for those of us who went out and bought them, they're a bit obscure. This can make for quite a challenge if something goes wrong, or the software just corrupts itself and the console gets bricked. That is, unless you have a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico(opens in new tab) on hand to save the day.

YouTuber Voultar(opens in new tab) (via Tom's Hardware(opens in new tab)) is hell-bent on saving Wii U's from corruption. They bought five bricked consoles for testing, all of which featured either one or both of the unrecoverable 160-0101 and 160-0103 error report numbers on startup. These errors point to either an out-of-date system or one that's been corrupted, and Voultar managed to fix all of them with the use of this Raspberry Pi Pico fix.

The fix makes use of GaryOderNichts UDPIH (USB Descriptor Parsing Is Hard) software which you can check out for yourself on GitHub(opens in new tab). This tool is actually using an exploit in the USB host stack descriptor to directly insert software into the Wii U, so depending on how it's used it could do all sorts of things good and bad to the console. 

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