I have a Wii U with a blinking blue light and when I plug the HDMI into he TV, the TV doesn't even recognize that it is connected to any device. I brought to a repair place but they were clueless and told me it was the sensor bar and to just buy one on ebay and that would fix the problem of the controller not connecting and they didn't even realize the console is the problem. After much online research, have I come to the right conclusion that this is a bricked console and the next step is to try to unbrick it using a raspberry pico or NAND-AID? I don't know what that all entails but if you tell me that's what it is, I'll give it a go. Or are there any places I can send it to to get it repaired?
A blue blinking light on a Wii U means the SLC is corrupt or the console has bad RAM. In my experience bad RAM is extremely rare. I would wager that its SLC corruption.
Is this console originally yours? Do you know the history of it?
That being said, you can do some diagnosing using a UDPIH/Recovery Menu. This should give you enough information to figure out if this needs a NAND-AID or if the SLC corruption is from something else, for example homebrew mods can cause this.
I got ahead of myself. My apologies. SLC corruption on a Wii U still requires defuse as far as I know. I would love to test this further, but unfortunately I have not seen a Wii U console with the blinking blue light issue since last year.
As for testing whether its SLC corruption or bad RAM. This is rather simple. If you can load successfully into the minute menu the RAM is fine. If however you attempt boot1 and it fails to load the minute menu, then the RAM is bad.
My guide for defuse is here (https://www.tzirf.com/nintendo-consoles-handhelds/how-to-use-wii-u-defuse-guide/)
Yes, this console is original to me. No mods. How do I try to load into the minute menu? Is that following the Defuse instructions you linked to?
Yes that is following the Defuse instructions I posted a link for. I would recommend watching the video I created where I show how to use Defuse. As for booting into the minute menu, once you have setup a raspberry pi pico/memory card to be used with Defuse and soldered the raspberry pi pico into the Wii U console. You power the console on and it will boot into the minute menu automatically with a successful defuse.
Using defuse does require soldering many wires to the Wii U console and connecting them to a Raspberry Pi Pico.