How hard would it be to clone the Wii U gamepad, the quirky controller with its unique embedded screen? This is the question that [MattKC] faced as he noticed the complete lack of Wii U gamepad replacements from either Nintendo or third-parties, leading him down the rabbit hole of answering said question.
Although unloved and even despised in compared to the Nintendo Wii, the Wii U was a solid system in its own right. One of its interesting additions was the gamepad controller, whose screen games used for features like a private screen during multiplayer and 3DS-like map screens. Its main weakness is however that the Wii U gamepad was considered an irreplaceable part of the console, which is obviously not fun if your gamepad breaks and your console along with it.
The Wii U console and gamepad communicate via 5 GHz 802.11n WiFi, but in order to deter other parties from simply hopping onto the access point, Nintendo slightly obfuscated this WiFi standard. Specifically the WPA authentication was modified by a byte swap in the PTK, rendering every existing WiFi stack incompatible with the Wii U.
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