OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Hardware Mods => Topic started by: Da_Blitz on September 20, 2005, 09:03:15 am
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I have been pulling appart my PDA and studying the insides to see what type of upgrades are posible, i thoght it would be a good idea to put them all in the one place as well as give you some more info on how easy they are to do.
Overclocking:
Easy to do, it seems that intels manufacturing capabiliteies produce alot of good chips. i have yet to see a pxa270 that cant be clocked to at least 520Mhz, all the ones i have had have been able to do 624Mhz. the trade off is that the power consumtion shoots throgh the roof. bus speeds of 312mhz are easy to get but are of limited usefullness, if you try wierd clock speeds you can also increse the ram bus in small increments however the LCD screen ether tends to flicker or darkens at anything below 100Mhx (LCD clock) and scince the lcd clock is linked to the cpu one, wierd CPU freq's = wierd LCD freq
its easy to test for this one, just get your self an applet that sits in the tray and try out the diffrent speeds, then do a bit of work and try to get the cpu up to 100 usage, if it hangs try a diffrent freq. the good thing about this is when you reboot the chip goes back to its normal speed so it would be hard to stuff somthing up permantly (no garantee here)
Ram Upgrade:
The chips are from samsung and are from the "mobile SD-RAM" catagory, meaning they top out at 512Mb. this translates to a maximum of 128MB in your C*k, there are pin compatible parts but are ball grid array (hard to solder) and are slightly wider and may not fit (still have to mesure) on the plus side they consume very little extra current (the larger chips that is) and are slightly faster, but no anything you would notice.
it would also be posible to raise the RAM bus speed as you could buy a faster chip than the zaurus currently has to see a speed boost. the current chips are running at aout 104mhz, the next speed bracket for RAM BUS speed is 208Mhz so you would need a good chip to hit this mark. but there would be a noticble gain in performance
[EDIT] I found a way to solder new chips easily, my original thoght was to use a daghter board only for RAM sizes > 128MB however if you always use a daghter board then you can postion the board over the removed ram's holes and apply solder down the vias, this works for soldering the ram chips to the daghter board as well meaning you can do this with a normal soldering iorn, i need to talk to some people but all sounds good at the moment, "no skills required" and best of all it would work for any PDA based on a PXA chipset, this would also mean you could use surface mount or BGA RAM parts, just buy the correct daghter board, you could even salvage RAM from old SDRAM sticks, 1GB here i come [/EDIT]
[EDIT]Looking good, may move to a seperate thread as it can be usod on basically any PDA HOWEVER anything over 128MB gets large quickly and would chew alot of juice (in other words i cant wait to try it), the daghter board at the moment is the size oy a small clamshell in theroy (in practice et mmay be slightly larger) the problem is that the pxa27x dosent play nice with stupidly large RAM (i had to say it) eg > 512Mbit and supports only a few select configorations [/EDIT]
Flash upgrade:
The big daddy of all upgrades. The good news: the 16Gb chip is pin compatible with the current chips in your pda and you can have 2 (16Gb = 2GB). however the bad news is that there may be software issues present. if the pxa boots from this flash then it should be easy to upgrade, however if it boots from ROM then there may be an issue. i suspect the second as the chip is 8bits and the pxa needs a 16bit or 32 bit chip to boot
the problem is that the setup code might incorectly set up the chip. i will have to look into this but i am sure there is a work around. one side affect of 2 chips is the bus width could be doubled, as well as using chips that are twice as fast so there would be a read performance increses as well as a tiny write speed one
[EDIT] Still possible need stupidly large flash chips (like from a broken nano) as i want to see the max capacity we can use, i might see if i can go into an apple store and buy a broken nano (yeah i am sure they wont let me, unless i say im to poor to buy one but want to look like an idiot^H^H^H^H^H cool apple guy) [/EDIT]
2700G:
The one we have all been wating for, for those of you who dont know what it is i will give a quick rundown of it.
It is a video card that supports 32MB of SDRAM, video out, OPEN GL ES, accelerated video decoding of divx,Xvid,WMV. It allows playback of 2Mbps Xvid streams of 720 * 480 pixels downscaled to 640 * 480 on the axim x50v, with cpu cycles to spare on an external compuer monitor. with the main CPU clocked at a slow 208Mhz this translates to about 3.5 hours of video (you get about 1hr or less if you dont use the video card and you have to clock the device up to 624Mhz).
I leraned about this when i was reviewing a post i made concerning CF read writes impacting the bandwidth of the SD RAM (because they both share the same data bus). when i looked at the 2700g specs i relised that nearly all the pins i needed to interface it to the CPU where avalible at the CF socket, mainly address pins and data pins. the rest were easily accsessable scince i was going to think aobut upgrading the memorey as well
after overclocking this would be the second easyiest mod to achive as it would plug into the cf socket and require soldering a couple of extra wires (less than any other mod) that are esy to get acsess to. and if you own the c1k it would be easy to put the card where the microdrive would sit. you would also still be able to use the socket for CF cards as well however most likly not at the same time unless you do not mind plugging the cf card into an adaptor underneath the zaurus
[EDIT] superceded but still posible, could be handy due to the crappy usb update speed, see below i would like some feedback into which you wold prefer [/EDIT]
[EDIT] Still posible, need both chips and to locate 1 I) line, moved to seperate thread see: https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=18131 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=18131) for my hacking info [/EDIT]
Video Out:
the father of the mod above, this may be posible because of the way the pxa spits data at the LCD screen, it provides everything you need to interface to an external DAC ( Digital 2 analog converter) that would connect to a standard monitor cable, alowing a mirror image of whatever is on screen and if you are willing to turn of the LCD screen when you plug a monitor in you would be able to get 800 * 600 on it by tweaking some registers
[EDIT] Meanie has got a sis usb video card to work, i would love to see an x server or console running on this however i am prepared to wait, hopfully with a bit of hacking i can get it to compile under a 2.6 ARM kernel (its in the mainline now), so basically it superceddes this and the 2700G hack as it is a full video card, hopfully with opengl but i wouldnt hold youre breath but it is the best video out sulution for the zaruses info at http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisusbvga.shtml (http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisusbvga.shtml) https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11129&st=15 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11129&st=15) support at the moment is for slideshows only (under 2.4 zaurus kernels that is), oh and you may be able to hack it for dual head support lets see an axim do that!!! [/EDIT]
Bluetooth:
the pxa has a serial port dedicated for use with a bluetooth chip. it would be posible to get a usb dongle and use ether the serial port or the usb port to connect it up. once again this is easy to do but could be hard to find space in your pda case to fit it
[EDIT] I now have a tiny bluetooth dongle tahts a bit larger than the usb port it is soldered ta and am about to give it a go with the USB hack below which supercedes this hack due to it working with everything USB bassed [/EDIT]
Internal USB
see https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13562&st=150 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13562&st=150) for discussion or http://www.iral.com/~albertr/linux/zaurus/wireless/ (http://www.iral.com/~albertr/linux/zaurus/wireless/) for details however it bassically is a USB port that you can solder onto that is not being used, want wifi.... fine, want bluetooth.... fine, want 2 wifi cards and a bluettoth for some unique wifi always on hotspot hopping (or MITM stuff )..... Ok, my plans are to build a docking station ar if i can pull it off redesighn the bottom for more space.
Accelorometer/gyroscope:
Just when you thoght it could not get any better you hear about this, umagine shaking your PDA to play a new random song, or moving it clockwise to go foward in your playlist and anti clockwise to go back. how about tilting the pda to move the mouse? if you heard about accelerometers in the new laptops then this is taking it to the next step.
a laptop would be hard to tilt around to use as a mouse for an extended period of time however a pda is much liter, and there are times where i am using the keyboard and have to take out the stylis tap the screen and put eit away again, why cant i just tilt the PDA? i am looking into this but it looks like all i have to do is wire an analg devices gyroscope/accelerometer to the SPI port in the pda and write a driver
as a side effect i will now know when i should park the harddrive heads
the accelerometer would be handeled diffrently, it would be a mice interface as well but i was thinking that a user daemon would connect to it and interpret diffrent movments to mean diffrent things (eg wax on/off, shaking the device, shaking the devie left/right - up/down) all while holding a button so you can go for a jog without setting it off
the best thing for me is the accelerometer/mouse with MPD so i can go without X and still have all the benifits (thogh with 1GB of ram that may not be much of a prblem any more)
Cell Phone Hack
I am sure you are aware that you can connect to the net using a cellphone and a laptop, however you can also do the same thing from your PDA, and use it to send/recive text messages. also (thogh unconfirmed) you may be able to set up the zaurus as a answering machine for your phone (if you want to, im sure some people are happy with voice mail) by using the mgetty packages (requires a voice modem, thats why unconfirmed if not voice modem then plug into audio port) basically you take the serial port on the back of your pda and wire it up to a phone (clamshell works best as you can remove the screen) or plug into usb
you might run out of space but thats why im building a new case/docking station
This is just a list of what we might be able to do, if you are intrested in technical details get in touch but keep in mind that none have been achived yet. also feature listed here may be imposible to implement but i have made estimates of what can be done. i am also intrested in what you would like to see as that will influence what i work on, i dont expect to see more than 2 finished by the end of this year unless i am lucky or some one else works on one.
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I have to applaud your efforts... My soldering skills are limited to through-hole stuff, and if I went anywhere near SMT, there'd be a smoking moulten mess left where there was once a working PDA.
Good luck with whatever projects you take on; personal preference would be to see an increase in RAM into the devices...
If you'd like a hand writing up your experiences or getting the documentation tidied, drop me a line as I'd like to help where I can.
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Am I the only one who thinks "Upgrading your C*k" sounds like a subject line for a spam email?
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Yup I gave up motherboard repairs some years ago as we were getting fewer repairs and more smoking ruins as VLSI and surface mount technology increased the density of components to the point that it became almost impossable to desolder components without killing the components arround the chip to be removed.
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Back to the subject, we might talk about plenty of potential possibilities, but nothing happens until someone does it. Personally, I'm all for doing a BT module implantation into my C1K (via either serial or usb), but let's get real - how we are gonna trace the lines? Unless someone does it, it all remains to be a wishful thinking.
The simple way of tracing the lines (as it was discussed on the other thread) is getting a fried C1K/C3X00 mainboard and carefully remove the PXA270 chip. Knowing its pin-out, we can trace some of the pins to other components on the pcb.
Does anyone have a dead mainboard and willing to donate it? If so, please let me know, and I will be more than glad to trace the lines and make it a public knowledge.
-albertr
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Am I the only one who thinks "Upgrading your C*k" sounds like a subject line for a spam email?
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Yes.
I'll soon receive my second C3000 unit (backup and experiment unit). Then I only need some spare time and I'll do some hardware hacks as well.
Thanks a lot for all these valuable pieces of information.
The most important upgrade for me would be more flash, in order to make the system safer and easier to backup (i.e. an upgrade to a C3100).
Bluetooth would be nice, but not a must yet, as I do not have many other BT devices yet.
More RAM... well. Not that important at the moment, because all the RAM-intensive things, mostly X/QT, are not very useful to me anyway because of their low speed.
Video out would definitely be great.
What else... well. I'll definitely replace the Microdrive with a flash card some day, when huge flash cards become affordable.
daniel
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I have been pulling appart my PDA and studying the insides to see what type of upgrades are posible, i thoght it would be a good idea to put them all in the one place as well as give you some more info on how easy they are to do.
<snip>
This is just a list of what we might be able to do, if you are intrested in technical details get in touch but keep in mind that none have been achived yet. also feature listed here may be imposible to implement but i have made estimates of what can be done. i am also intrested in what you would like to see as that will influence what i work on, i dont expect to see more than 2 finished by the end of this year unless i am lucky or some one else works on one.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=96391\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Great list. I'm interested in the RAM & NAND upgrades and internal bluetooth hack.
I did some calling around and found a place here in the US that will do BGA removal, reballing and mounting. Without seeing the board or replacement components he could only approximate the price but thinks about $45 to do the RAM (not sure whether that's for the whole job or per chip). I'm going to package up some of the pictures I posted and send them to him along with the datasheets on the memory to get a firmer quote. I've "read" the pictures on the Japanese website where the C700 RAM upgrade was documented. The job required making a couple of additional connections. Any idea whether this job would? I don't mind doing surface attachments myself but need some help sussing it out. Anyone have any idea whether this upgrade can be done with simple chip replacements, or will it take some additional soldering? What about kernel mods?
I'll do some research to find it, but if anyone has a link to the datasheets for the replacement RAM close by I can get an email off today.
Thanks,
Aaron
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forgot to add the mcirodive > flash upgrade and the microdrive to larger microdrive upgrade and heatsinks on the processor/microdrive for better life/better overclocking. if you look at the CPU its in a metal case and not even connected to it. a bit of thermal post could improve that dramatically.
seeing what each part does is posible if you have an osscilascope. you can look at the wave forms and compare it to the documentation. other things like if the data buss on the flash chips (there are 2 sockets with only one connected) are in parrallel or share the same bus (basically can i modify it to be a 16 bit bus rather than 8bits for a speed increse
BGA is a problem. for the video card i will need to get custom multilayer boards manufactured but i know a company who do up to 6 layers for a good price as well as solder parts for you (including BGA) however i am intrested in that BGA replacment service links anyone?
here are the links to the ram. ant rember which one it is but they are all pin compatible so not much of a problem, (what we have: 256Mbit (http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/common/product_list.aspx?family_cd=DRM0503) , What we want: 512Mbit (http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/common/product_list.aspx?family_cd=DRM0504) ) i belive the part number was K4S561633F, however i would be intrested in getting a lower voltage chip due to the power savings, i can only do this if i can find a 1.8v line, the advantage is that the 1.8v chip uses half the power
bluetooth should be easy to find, just dump "a" onto the serial port and start probing at random if its connected but i agree if any one has a dead CK series then it would speed things up, might have to get a second one.
i personally want the 2700 hack (or video out) More ram for buffering MP3's (less power consumed spining up micro drive) and bluetooth (for Bluetooth Headphones for mp3's), this all fits in with my other projects that should help to reduce power consumption of the enitre system, i know from the Windows Mobile days that underclocking the CPU gives you a whole lot more battery life, lowering the voltage gives you even more
i did have a link to a complete part listing of the internals but i dont have it on me at the moment
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as promised here is a link to the site that details the chips. after having a look at the PCB, there appears to be some issues, they have chosen a 4 or 6 layer board and have put power planes on the outside macking following the tracks next to imposible, all it really does is slow us down
hope for an update soon detailing how likly and easy it will be to do each mod now that i have a bit of time on my hands, will reply soon
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What a brilliant thread!
It looks like if Sharp won't produce the "perfect" Zaurus for me to upgrade to, the ZUG will.
I'm really interested in hearing how you get on with this. As a hint, if there was an on-line importer who wanted to sell a custom Zaurus, well some of these upgrades don't sound like they would add that much to the price of a 3100.....
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kicking myself about this but here is the link ( http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/1115/pda38.htm (http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/1115/pda38.htm) ) sorry about that
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interesting, thanks. But the ram upgrade seems to be a bit impossible, at least not without a reflow oven and the reflow profile for that particular product. I wonder if you can just heat the chip up then use some low temp solder paste to solder it on.....hmmm. A nice upgrade from 64MB ram to say 128 or 256(even better would be great!
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Thanks for you diligence and enthusiasm, da_blitz.
I'm still saving for a Z and if all goes well, I will have a C1000 in 5 weeks.
I have a friend going to Japan that will looking for one for me.
I'm interested in all your projects, but I would really love to have VGA-out for the Zaurus, as I am planning on replacing my home PC, Work PC and PDA with a Zaurus. Having VGA-out will make that task so much easier.
I, and I'm sure others, would probably be willing to donate or at the least encourage you in your projects.
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all i ask for is if i get the 2700g working is driver support.
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in my experience, there are two things which happen when removing a device from a high density circuit board (espec. surface mount). one way destroys the device but usually leaves the circuit board intact, the other way destroys the circuit board but usually leaves the device intact.
how?
first way is to invert the board so the device is hanging, and is gripped with some sort of pliers. a very hot soldering iron or mini blow-torch is used to heat the device so that it pulls away quickly before the board is damaged.
second way is to put a heatsink on the device which you pull, then blast the board from behind, ruining everything, but the board gets hot faster than the device, so device comes free undamaged - blow on it quickly to cool it!
Note that either of these techniques applied to your zaurus is a BAD idea, and I take no responsibility if you try it out. But if you do, let us know.
Oh yeah, and if I were you: practise on something else first!
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Intel PXA270 documentation (http://www.intel.com/design/embeddedpca/applicationsprocessors/302302.htm?iid=search&)
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i think that heatsinking the device then coming in from the side with a focused hot air gun would be the way to go however the higher density ram chips are wider than the exsisting ones, plus for that mod you can afford to lose the chips so all is good
there are none that require the reuse of the chip afterwards, however the memory upgrade could affect the pxa270 as they are so close however i plan to add a heatsink anyway to the pxa to see if it allows for higher or same speeds at lower voltage which would improve battery life. at the moment i am not to happy with the way the zaurus disapates heat.
in an ideal world after i have done these mods i would redo the bottom part of the case in somthing like aluminum with 1 mm high fins. not required but ibelive it would be quite cool as well as help disapate heat more evenly (litium ion batteries hate heat)
thanks for the link. when my site is up and fully working i will put my full bookmarks up which have infomation on everything you need
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Bad news, the 2700g upgrade might not happen. it seems that intel is unwilling to suport small runs of chips meaning that even if i can get product samples i cant do a small run for others so they can get 3d acceleration and video out
on the plus side the ram upgrade looks good, just have to order the chips and find someone to resolder, and the original video out should still work so expect an update on that soon. in the mean time i will try and see if i can find someone else who buys that chip and order it throgh them.
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dont want to go with ATI ? they have updated the embedded gpu line, plus was thinking might be bouns if chip is pin/pin compatible (swap out) ?? whoops my bad i see the 2300g is ati (was thinking it was a intel made chip) humm .....
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the 2700g is an intel chip, and unless ati have radically overhauled thier embbeded chips then i would not expect much as the intel chips are generations ahead. the other option is nvidia as they updated thier chips but i have yet to look int them
the reasong i went intel is because very little would need to be done to get it working and they have released documents to allow you to write a driver, ATI on the other hand dosent like to release details about thier chips (look at thier desktop card range)
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Found a way to get 2700g chips, ask someone who uses the chips in comerical designs if we can buy a small surpluss of parts off them, its our best chance at getting parts
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but how we connect the 2700G to the Pxa270 i mean there is some place in the pcb for that?
i am intersted to buy a 2700G chip myself if you get some:)
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This is where the fun begins (grins), acording to the 2700G chipset datasheet manula it uses the SRAM and VLIO interface of the chip, looking at the PXA chipset manual and you see that most of the required lines are in fact common with the CF slots and the RAM
so if you do the ram upgrade it would be a good idea to do this at the same time. at the moment there are a couple of lines that need to be identified. but once they are found it should be easy to do. i have a list somwhere of the lines that need to found but it wont take long
basically all we have to find are the chip select lines and hope that they connected one to the test pads for "debuging" so they could run a utility program before flashing the chip.
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I have three simple questions about 2700G upgrade.
1) Will the CF interface bandwidth be enough for all the 2700G possible activities?
2) Will we have compatibility problems with CF solution (e.g. some game runs perfectly on Axim X50V w/Linux but fails on Z with 2700G CF card)?
3) What will be the price of such piece of art? Many of us including meself can afford a reasonable sum of money for it, say, $100-$150 but not much more. So you'll have to place an order big enough to make all this proprietary PCB design and so on built down to such values.
BTW, when engineering PCB consider placing VGA/RF-out there as well - it would be truly great.
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VGA out is another hack but it is easier to do throgh the 2700g card than the LCD bus, if the 2700g dosent work out there is still hope for VGA out, or do the Blackdog aproch and vnc into your pda
The CF card has nothing to do with it really, its intended to be an internal mod as the CF bus is only 16 bit and we will need 32, if you read some of my other technical posts you find that the SDRAM and the CF cards are on the same bus but operate at diffrent speeds and protcals yet dont interfere so CF wont limit us, cant be sure of compatability, as far as i know there isnt a working driver for the axim x50v (im on the mailing list, they have been discussing it for a couple of days now) they do however have the frambuffer working just not accelerated opengl ES stuff which most linux games arent written for (open GL is floating point where open gl ES is all integer)
if the 2700g cant be done i am willing to egineer a fpga and DAC into a card to implement video out and limited 2d hardware acceleration (if you want 3d then you can write some hardware for the fpga to do it) (and no, WRITE SOME HARDWARE was not a typo) the only problem is that it would not be fast enogh for video as reading and writing kills the bandwidth for ram, however i might have a hack for that as well (intel datasheets are fun), hell if you had a fpga CF card you could even write a AES/DES crypto acceleration module or IDE hard drive interface, or if you are crazy (which is more fun trust me) you could write a SATA interface, gigabyte did it for thier pci RAMDISK.
cost would not be more than $150US however more than $100 would be pushing it for me, i think more than that is a bit exspensive. there is a minimum of 5 PCB's per run and i could fit a couple per bouard (about 4 per 100cm2 and would do it throgh these guys http://www.ezpcb.com/index1.php (http://www.ezpcb.com/index1.php) (and get them to do surface mount soldering) would like to do a 4 layer desing but 2 might be fine its 249 for 4 layers and i get 5 boards or 50 for 2 layers with 5 boards, with 3 to 4 designs per board so up to 20 cards for $249/$50
works out to be farily cheap, i have a whole lot of other stuff i need to get made throgh them as well.
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Yes, that's very promising link. So we're looking forward to 2700G&VGA-out upgrade.
BTW, did you check the possibility to add new Bluetooth 1.2 & 2.0 chips into Z case? If yes, please post information about that since most people around here just want to solder in BT chip and use serial BT profile for mobile phones. They aren't interested very much in HID and especially new audio profiles.
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too bad. wireless audio via bluetooth (a2dp) is so cool. It's my #1 motivation in bluetooth hacking on my 6000 at the moment
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kicking myself about this but here is the link ( http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/1115/pda38.htm (http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/1115/pda38.htm) ) sorry about that
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Hi,
I'm pretty new to my dog(akita) so I won't upgrade that fast.... I just wanted to ad something to the thread:[a href=\"http://http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpc.watch.impress.co.jp%2Fdocs%2F2004%2F1115%2Fpda38.htm&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=de&newwindow=1&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools]The mod in the english translation[/url]
Best regards from good old germany
Marc
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I really dont like google translation as it never seems to do a whole page, it always stops at the half way point, oh well, the link should be http//translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpc.watch.impress.co.jp%2Fdocs%2F2004%2F1115%2Fpda38.htm&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=de&newwindow=1&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools, there was an extra http://
im in it for the a2dp, already have the headphones (dont buy the logitech ones if you have a normal sized head as the headphones split in two after 2 weeks very heavy usage or 1 month regular), at the moment i would just solder to the back of the usb port and lose client mode. if you need to connect get a usb comp to comp or a 10/100 network card. main problem is finding room in the case, once again i recomend the DBT-120 bluetooth adaptor from dlink due to its size.
bluetooth is a bit of a no brainer, for the 2.0 speeds ou really need somthing faster than the usb host port or serial port on the zaurus as these top out at 1 mbit (ok usb does a bit more)
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Guys.
For BGA soldering/desoldering you need a device called BGA soldering station. They are like $30K new but can be bought used for much cheaper on eBay.
A buddy of mine bought one for himself recently for around $1000. He plans to build his own supercomputer .
Anyway, desoldering and soldering on this device is as simple as placing the board in the device, programming the time and temperature.
For desoldering the device blows hot air on the chip, then a suction cup lowers and picks up the chip. Soldering is the same, just in reverse. It is all automatic. The tricky thing is for different size chips different size heads and air skirts are required. And since he just bought this device I am not going to trust him with soldering on my Zaurus ;-)
Anyway, according to him BGA soldering/desoldering is easy when you have proper equipment. BGA chip reuse and reballing is supposed to be easy and boring as well (when you have to reball many chips).
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Guys.
For BGA soldering/desoldering you need a device called BGA soldering station. They are like $30K new but can be bought used for much cheaper on eBay.
A buddy of mine bought one for himself recently for around $1000. He plans to build his own supercomputer .
Anyway, desoldering and soldering on this device is as simple as placing the board in the device, programming the time and temperature.
For desoldering the device blows hot air on the chip, then a suction cup lowers and picks up the chip. Soldering is the same, just in reverse. It is all automatic. The tricky thing is for different size chips different size heads and air skirts are required. And since he just bought this device I am not going to trust him with soldering on my Zaurus ;-)
Anyway, according to him BGA soldering/desoldering is easy when you have proper equipment. BGA chip reuse and reballing is supposed to be easy and boring as well (when you have to reball many chips).
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Can you apply the heat to specific chips in such a device?
From what I have heard, such a device is only able to solder / desolder entire circuit boards at once.
More convenient, much cheaper but a little bit risky seems to be usage of a hot air blower and some metal shields to prevent the heat to damage surrounding parts.
daniel
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Can you apply the heat to specific chips in such a device?
From what I have heard, such a device is only able to solder / desolder entire circuit boards at once.
More convenient, much cheaper but a little bit risky seems to be usage of a hot air blower and some metal shields to prevent the heat to damage surrounding parts.
daniel
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The BGA soldering station is a complicated programmable hot air blower ;-)
Yes, the it applies hot air locally. The head of the device is constructed so it only blows hot air at the chip and the sides are protected, hot air is then routed to back up so it doesnt heat up other elements on the board. My buddy told me that it needs different size heads for different chips though so it doesnt heat up surrounding area and chips.
You can probably solder and desolder using some hot air blower. But you will not be able to control temperature and time and airflow. On this thing you program temperature and time, select solder or desolder and press a button ;-)
Newer soldering stations have additional laser alignment tools, cameras to monitor position of the chip and lots of other goodies.
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Been looking into a hack that allows us to only need to remove the chip, resoldering the chips may be able to be done with a standard soldering iorn with this mod
the advantage is that we can also support up to the 1GB of ram the pxa supports: effectivly its a daughter card with a section that lines up where the chips used to be which we pour solder down to make the connection but will come preloaded with bga ram parts as well as the adress decoding logic to support more ram
kind of complex to imaginge but easy to egineer
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Been looking into a hack that allows us to only need to remove the chip, resoldering the chips may be able to be done with a standard soldering iorn with this mod
the advantage is that we can also support up to the 1GB of ram the pxa supports: effectivly its a daughter card with a section that lines up where the chips used to be which we pour solder down to make the connection but will come preloaded with bga ram parts as well as the adress decoding logic to support more ram
kind of complex to imaginge but easy to egineer
[div align=\"right\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=107184\")
I contacted pocket pc tech, as a friend suggested,
he has a Dell axim and is considering their services.
[a href=\"http://www.pocketpctechs.com/main~unit~Dell_Axim_X51v-509~area~upgrades~item~D51-064-128RAM.htm]http://www.pocketpctechs.com/main~unit~Del...-064-128RAM.htm[/url]
From what I gather, the Dell memory,
and Zaurus are similar BGA, and size I dont know about speed, I'll have to
check on that. Here is the response I recieved.
Hi carl,
We have not evaluated the unit.
Regards,
Leonard
If enough of us are willing
to pay for their services, maybe they might actually look into doing upgrades for
Zaurus models. $169 might seem a bit much, but I'm sure you need a soldering station to do the upgrade, so my soldering iron is out of the question.
Carl
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you need a bga reworking station that blows heat in a very tiny cone
im in, the parts i belive are simmilar or thesmae part number and as for speed the xscales cant handel anything greater than 100mhz, that siad i would rather pay extra to get a 133mhz part or even 150mhz if they can find them (they do exsist)
the reason i want this is that the pxa gets its arse kicked when acsessing ram becasue of a number of factors but its the primary reason why it was no faster than the stron ram series of processor, however if you run from cache and have a good compiler then this is reduced greatly
btw quick update, been working on a "soft mod" at the moment that consists of a special kernel (i can hear people groaning now) bassed on the 2.6 series of kernel as well as optimised programs to get as much speed out of this thing as we can, also it means i can have a command line only setup which i have wanted for awhile (althogh pdaxrom has fixed that to some degree)
the usb bluetooth hack is posible and as i got a soldering iorn for doing surface mount parts i might start experimenting, however just note that internal bluetooth in its current state makes you lose usb client (you have been warned) however you can just use a usb host to host cable
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ok after getting some feedback from people who are intrested in the list of hacks i have put up (feedback = reqest for status ) i thoght it was about time i updated. in addition i plan to keep this thread up to date on hardware hacks for the c??00 (regex) , i will update my first post to reflect what we have achived
at the momont we have confirmed an internal USB host port and connected stuff to it, this means that you can now have any USB acessory you want inside the casee if it fits, if it dosent then you can think outside the square and look at making a new case for it, how does a 22 in 1 card reader/hub sound to you, i like the idea of 2 SD slots and 3 CF () details at https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13562&st=165 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13562&st=165) and http://www.iral.com/~albertr/linux/zaurus/wireless/ (http://www.iral.com/~albertr/linux/zaurus/wireless/)
VGA out is possible with some acceleration throgh USB, so if you like the above hack maybe make a docking station instead, the USB vga card i am talking about is bassed on a USB to pci bridge with a pci video card bassed on the sis315 chipset and can take over specific Virtaul consoles allowing you to have a console on your zaurus and X on the adaptor or the other way around (my pearsonal pref) more info at http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisusbvga.shtml (http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisusbvga.shtml) and pics of the product http://62.245.135.196/internet/distec.nsf/..._contrl_USB.htm (http://62.245.135.196/internet/distec.nsf/index/en_contrl_USB.htm) for a post from someone who did it https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11129&st=15 (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11129&st=15)
and finally the ram hack - IMHO the coolest and hardest hack to pull off that said it is possible and after some thinking i did 2 mins ago the best way to do it would be with a PCB to hold all the chips (up to 1GB that had an area of vias that hung out to the side, you line up the vias with the PCB and SLODER THEM WITH A NORMAL SOLDERING IORN (sorrf for caps but it means that i have finally solved the hardest part of the problem: how to solder BGA parts without damadging the other chips on board, if you are intrested and have electrical experince conntact me as i need to talk details with some people as well as beta testers, now anyone with a soldering iorn will be abel to do the hack
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added accelerometer and updated stuff on frount page, may be doing SDRAM hack in near futre
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i would like to make the ram mod... looking forward for a detailed "how-to"...
Thanks man!
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i am thinking of buying a c3100 to experiment on as this is a one way mod that willl break the device if you stuff it up, basically at the moment i just need to check numbers
expect more news in a week
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added gsm/gprs hack, updated 2700g hack and ram hack, enjoy
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*bump*
sounds like you and Guylhem will need to get together and launch your own PDA!
I can't help but feel the HTC uni would be a better place to start. Or, persuade Dialogue (the Flybook people) to do a smaller version of the flybook (shame about the price!)
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Read other post i have always had some plans ready to go, problems always cost, in small runs there would be no cost savings but what you would save you could easily invest for a Massive increse in performance
i like the uni but want 2 CF slots, i am starting to hit some of the limitations of this device (for vga out) that are becomming annoying
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Read other post i have always had some plans ready to go, problems always cost, in small runs there would be no cost savings but what you would save you could easily invest for a Massive increse in performance
i like the uni but want 2 CF slots, i am starting to hit some of the limitations of this device (for vga out) that are becomming annoying
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snag is, as ever, trying to fit more and more computing power into the smallest space... or add more features and make the device bigger (would the Z sell as well if it were say even just 0.5" longer and wider? I think the relatively poor sales of the 6000 answer that).
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True thats why i like the backpacks of the old compaq series
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[EDIT] I found a way to solder new chips easily, my original thoght was to use a daghter board only for RAM sizes > 128MB however if you always use a daghter board then you can postion the board over the removed ram's holes and apply solder down the vias, this works for soldering the ram chips to the daghter board as well meaning you can do this with a normal soldering iorn, i need to talk to some people but all sounds good at the moment, "no skills required" â„¢ and best of all it would work for any PDA based on a PXA chipset, this would also mean you could use surface mount or BGA RAM parts, just buy the correct daghter board, you could even salvage RAM from old SDRAM sticks, 1GB here i come [/EDIT]
[EDIT]Looking good, may move to a seperate thread as it can be usod on basically any PDA HOWEVER anything over 128MB gets large quickly and would chew alot of juice (in other words i cant wait to try it), the daghter board at the moment is the size oy a small clamshell in theroy (in practice et mmay be slightly larger) the problem is that the pxa27x dosent play nice with stupidly large RAM (i had to say it) eg > 512Mbit and supports only a few select configorations [/EDIT]
Da_blitz, any update on this? This seems so interesting. The Zaurus really deserves a RAM upgrade!
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its posible and the method is easy to do however the complxity is in the seftware, you have to patch the bootloader and the kernel you are using
if you still want it i can give you the details on it. i never finished it off because i belive starting from scratch was a better idea
or if you are into BGA soldering you could just add higher density chips
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its posible and the method is easy to do however the complxity is in the seftware, you have to patch the bootloader and the kernel you are using
if you still want it i can give you the details on it. i never finished it off because i belive starting from scratch was a better idea
or if you are into BGA soldering you could just add higher density chips
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I am not afraid about the software part, I am definitively interested in the details! Would you post the details here, or in a separate thread for clarity?
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basically you get the footprint of a bga part and turn it into a throgh hole footprint (ie drill all the way throgh),
you then design the rest of the board so that the 2 RAM BGA parts connect to the correct pins so basically the RAM chips are off to the side and are sitting next to a footprint copy of themselves that have holes going throgh the pcb
now you unsolder the ram and solder small pins or snipits of led/resistor legs to where the old ram was, the idea being that this lines up with the bga foot prints that are throgh hole
you then place the pcb you made over these "pins" and feed them throgh, soldering and cliping off the excess as you go
nice and easy however it might be easier to just unsolder and resolder the bga part, software wise you have to identify the boot parameters and modify them as the intel PXA chipset will need new size /bank parametors for the new ram chips (nothing a binary grep wont find)
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A how-to on getto BGA parts removal. Use at your own risk!
http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?p...ame=WallabyJTAG (http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=WallabyJTAG)
Edit:
And here's an interesting site (these pages deal with BGA rework):
http://www.solder.net/technical/bga.asp (http://www.solder.net/technical/bga.asp)