Hi, welcome to Tear down Tuesday It's going to be fun today. It's Vintage Personal Computing time. We're going to take a look at the history of personal digital assistance over about a 20year period starting from the Scion 2 organizer in 1986, the Uh Palm Pilot 5000 from about 1996 10 years difference, and then about 7 or eight years later 2003 vintage, the HP iPad back. Ha.

It's going to be beautiful. Let's go. And a big thanks to Frederick Patrini from Sweden who sent these in for the mailbag as you saw last time. and this is quite an interesting chronological history of personal Digital Assistant Pdas.

We've got the Scion 2 uh from 1986 vintage and you'll notice that uh, this had basically a six-year uh lifespan. They discontinued it in 1992, and that's one of the first interesting things you'll see between these devices. The as we go to the Palm Pilot 5000 here, it only had like a two, or you know, a 2year uh, lifespan tops. Before they bought out a new model, it was superseded.

Everyone bought the new one, wasn't any use in anymore, nobody wanted it, and then we go uh, 8. seven years later, or thereabouts to 2003 three with the HP I pack here and we get to uh, basically the modern Uh, less than one year or uh, typically taken as 9 months I believe this was actually a 9mon uh time frame. When this product was viable, you know everyone was buying the new model. It only lasts for 9 months tops before the latest one come out.

Everyone wanted to switch. Nobody wanted this damn thing anymore. So it's that's the first thing you notice is the product lifetime of these things. I Mean if you remember Say the original Apple 2 computer or something like that the lifetime that thing was.

you know, more than a decade it was. You know it would hung around for a long time. It was still viable. But as you progress in technology there, just you know, consumerism at its finest to smartphones these days.

Heck, people are replacing their smartphones every six months I Think it's crazy, but anyway, you can see the progression. Uh, we got a Hatachi 63 One processor here at just under a megahertz and we basically go up by orders of magnitude here. Then we step up to a Motorola 68 328 processor at 16 MHz and then we jump up to a Pxa 25x scale uh which is actually an arm uh V5 processor run at 400 MHz at a core voltage of 1.3 Vols and the SRAM jumps up as well. We go from 8K SRAM 30 32k, ROM to 512 K Ram 4, MB ROM up to 128 megab of Uh SD ram with 48 megabytes of ROM.

And in terms of uh functionality, these two were pretty basic. The main uh difference you, we move from the querty uh, well, it wasn't a querty keyboard, but we move from a uh keyboard interface to a pen uh touch interface with handwriting recognition and stuff like that and then we jumped up to full Windows operating system. This one used Windows Mobile 2003 OS and it's got Bluetoth GPS fingerprint uh recognition as well and Wi-Fi built-in And then the next interesting thing we're going to see between these is uh, the jump in Battery Technology These two are pretty much identical. They used off the shelf.

this used a 9volt uh Pp3 battery. This one used two AAA batteries in there and then we jump up to these uh like modern phones. they used custom uh Lithium batteries in there. So that was one of the major progressions to Uh towards the modern devices because they chewed so much uh Power and you know, uh was so fast, needed so much energy, you couldn't get those from just your disposable uh batteries they went to rechargeable.

They had to go to Lithium technology to actually get the power density required for to run these modern devices at 400 mahz. whereas this thing um, you know ran on the sniff of an oily rag from a 9vol Pp3 battery. And then we've got the display technology. The Syon 2 used a classic 2 line by 16 character LCD which you're used to using in your hobby projects.

and then when we go up to 10 years later, go up to the Palm Pilot uh 5,000 here. here it's using a 160x 160 mono LCD and it's got the touchscreen uh, overlay of course. and then when you move up to a full uh Windows pocket PC Like this compact ipack we're talking about a 240x 320 TFT color display because, well, anything less than that and you're not going to be able to run uh, windows and and all the stuff that goes along with that. So enough of that.

Let's take these things apart and see what technology is inside of these things. And uh, in the Pal Pilot 2 here you're going to see um, you know, through hole technology. very basic, so packages and stuff like that will be using. you know, might Mo move up to quad, uh, flat packs and you know, like a higher density devices in something like this.

and up here we're going to get, you know, really single chip, uh, integration in? uh, something like this. So um, it'll be interesting to, uh, take a look at. You know we're talking 1986, 1996, and 2003. so almost a decade between them.

Let's check them out. Now let's take a look at the Scion 2 here. We got I Love the uh battery the 9vt battery connector down in there. It's not just your traditional battery snap on wires, it rocks like that and you slide it in.

It really is a very nice you know uh battery contact system. A lot of thoughts gone into that you know. I I Just really like attention to detail like that it's made in the UK Hello to all my UK viewers and uh, it's got a standard 0.1in headers down in there I Love it for all the expansion. Really old school stuff.

so it looks like there's three hasn't been undone for couple of decades 1986. Geez, what was happening in 1986. So it's got three screws here. Let's check it out.

It's got a A standard, just a single turn contrast adjust pot which would have been just adjusting the contrast on the 16x2. LCD Just like in your hobby projects. so A there we go. a Too easy.

Jewel B Construction There you go. Look at that A and it's just a two-part case. We've got our piso transducer there. It's got a couple of spring contacts fairly, uh, ordinary stuff.

which go to, uh, the just these tined pads down here. They're not, uh, goldplated. Interestingly, the bottom board down there is goldplated. You can see all the test points down on the board there.

But uh, this top board. uh. they decided Well when we're not going to, uh, bother with that so that should just lift out. now.

is there a header connecting those? No, there's a fixed. Oh, there's a ribbon. Just a, you know, a 0.1 in Pitch ribbon. A massive ribbon like that going the length of the two boards.

You can see it down in there. Wow, that's H Absolutely enormous. We've got some, uh, very large pitch quad flat packs down in there. some so pack hes and that's about it.

It's a fairly simplistic design I Like it. It's I Don't see there's very few passives on here at all. The top board looks like it's got some through hole stuff, so going to have to try and get these two apart. There's another screw down in there, so maybe and I got it.

Just had to bend the board up like that and a couple other screws down here. Look at the large axial electrolytic caps in there. We'll take a look at that uh in gred detail and I yeah, Made the mistake of tipping it upside down and all the keys fell out. Um, so I want to put that back together? I Got to figure out where the keys go.

Oops. and uh, of course, on the bottom, we've just got the uh membrane. They aren't tacked swe, they aren't tacked, they're just going straight down to your standard uh, rubber dies, standard conductive, uh, rubber backed buttons onto the goldplated pads. So pretty basic stuff there.

I Guess you know this quality of a machine? They probably should have used that TCT individual tactile domes there, but I can't remember what the tactile Dome technology was like back in 1986, but um, yeah, there's a interesting mix of uh, you know, decent, uh, you know, density for the day. uh, quad, uh, flat pack, large pitch devices of course, and a couple of massive, uh, electrolytic. Well, massive in the scheme of things here. um, axial electrolytic caps and that's 100 mic, uh, 40 volts I Can't see what the other one is.

Um, because this, uh, they almost certainly, um, hold the charge for the battery backed SRAM because when you everything was held in SRAM There was no uh, flash back in those days. No flash memory or anything like that to hold your hold your uh program and data in. So they held it all in uh SRAM which we'll take a look at here and that would have been they. They call it battery backed, but the battery in this case is just one of these electrolytic caps cuz there's no other uh battery on the board at all.

like there's no lithium battery or anything like that. Standard HC 49 Uh, case here for the crystal. We got a 32 khz watch crystal down in here and that's not held down, that's not gummed down at all that can just move. So I'm surprised cuz this thing had a reputation of being really super duper rugged and uh, they haven't stuck that 32 khz Crystal down at all.

It's a bit, uh, disappointing there. so it basically got some uh uh, you know, power and um LCD contrast adjust and just some passive. There's some so 23s there stuff for the interface here and uh, not much else standard .1 in um expansion headers I Absolutely love it. Um, just that fixed ribbon as we looked at and there's not much on this board at all.

Let's take a look at this one now. One of the interesting things you'll note about this board. as I said before, there's not many passives on here in terms of like, uh, bypass caps decoupling? uh, that kind of stuff. Why? Because really, we're talking about.

you know, a Megahertz here. this is not quick stuff at all. You could probably get by without any uh, bypass caps at all on this thing. potentially.

So you know they' got a, um, little, uh, 0805 bypass cap there? Maybe? no, they're the two uh, caps for the crystal. Looks like there's no bypass cap at all. Maybe on the bottom side of the board? No. I Can't see anything under there, so you know they.

They really just haven't bothered. Another B pass cap here, so they got a couple scattered over there, but it doesn't really need it signal Integrity is not a big deal when you're only working at a megahertz like this. One of the interesting things to note is the date code ET that stands for electrical test. So uh, the Bear board manufacturer put that on here 13th week 1989.

So this thing was first released in 1986 as I said. So you know this is uh, 3 years later, later manufactured and they still kept manufacturing it for another 3 years or so. And you know you can't imagine any device like this, um, having that sort of time, uh, span these days or product lifetime these days. It's just unheard of.

And I think One rather interesting thing to note is how that they've marked that this component is not fitted here. so they've put these black marks over those component pads where they haven't fitted some of the parts and they've done that in a couple of places around the board. Aha, it looks like the main clock frequency is actually 3.68 64 megaherz. not that uh, 900 khz.

that was actually the uh, previous model to this one, the Scon 1. So they've upped the speed of this one once again, to, you know, screaming 3.68 megahertz not 1 MHz And why is it that frequency instead of four? Well, it's very common to use this oddb frequency because 3.68 64 mahz is uh, directly divisible into your standard Uh Rs232 board rates like 9600. Check it on your calculator. Now, if we take a look at the ROM here, it's got an Atml at 27c 256 that's a one-time program or 256 kbit or 8K uh ROM.

But we've also got a secondary one here which is totally different brand, but it's B it's the same thing. it's a 256 kbit 32 kilobyte onetime programmable. ROM So this thing's actually got uh 64k of ROM I Thought it only had 32 and if we go down here to the Um SRAM we've got a uh a classic uh 6264 uh kbit uh SRAM which is 8 kiloby SRAM with an expandable uh a second footprint for a presumably you can just solder in the second device there and the uh firmware would automatically detect it. That would be my guess.

Or maybe there's a uh jumper link selection or something like that. And there's the main processor. It's a Hatachi which is now Renais uh HD 633 and it's directly compatible with the 6301 processor. and uh, it's as we said, it's running at 36864 megahertz.

So this is, you know, the highend of the model. Some of the older ones didn't actually uh, run that fast. made in Japan of course. And it's not a microcontroller.

it's a microprocessor. It's only got 192 bytes of built-in memory. Uh, as you see, it needs the external memory and the external ROM down here. And that's what differentiates a microcontroller from a micro processor like this.

and there's not much built in in terms of build-in functionality. There's a Serial interface uh built in, which is, you know, fairly modern for the time instead of using an external uh uart and uh, you know it's got a few registers and a couple of timers and not much else really. And as for the LCD, you'll recognize this number the 44780 so it is a classic. This is the original controller chip, which everyone copied, so practically every 16x, 20x, 2, 2x8, 40 By2, all of those LCD modules you see these days are compatible to the original Hitachi 44780 controller.

And interestingly, it's also got the HD 44100 LCD display driver. Because this is just the interface controller chip, it can't actually drive the drive directly the LCD segments. That's what this device is for. and of course, you don't see this very often these days.

Almost nobody uses a CH two chip solution anymore. It's very old school, so all of the new clones of the HD 44780 actually have a built-in LCD driver. Uh. To drive the Uh that you know requires the uh you know the bias and the AC signals to drive the LCD segments directly.

So whether or not they're actually cloning this I Guess it doesn't matter because when you're talking to the LCD all you need is to be command and interface compatible with the 44780, you don't care how you drive the Uh LCD And lucky last over here is an NEC 656 I Couldn't uh, quickly find any data on this thing. but given its location uh there next to the Uh ribbon cable and how it's sort of, you know, tied in with everything else. It's presumably some sort of you know, interface expander or uh, something like that because you know there's not many pins on this micro processor to drive things like the Uh keypad and the expansion headers and stuff like that. There's just not enough pin.

So presumably this is some sort of um, you know, interface controller chip and on the top board up here, near the expansion uh, interface here there's a Uh 4,000 series 4011 uh logic chip I don't know what that eight pin chip there is doing. We got a 32 khz, uh watch crystal here. Maybe that's a uh, real time clock perhaps? Um, and that's what the 32 khz crystals fors. A couple of uh, so 23 transistors there, presumably maybe a couple of regulators here LM 324 Couple of the large electrolytic axial caps as we saw.

Um, we've got our contrast adjust pot here and not much else. We've got an an inductor over here and probably another regulator. Not very exciting stuff. One rather curious thing: I Believe that under there looks like a trimmer cap for that 32 khz.

Crystal It's sort of half hidden under here I Think I'm going to have to take this off and have a look. No, nothing under there I Just took that off and but they've gone to the trouble to actually mold in a cover for that trimmer cap I Guess so that you can't uh, accidentally adjust it after it's all physically assembled like that. go figure. And the LCD screen itself.

Nothing much happening there. There'll just be a couple of, uh, zebra contact strips under there. uh, contacting the gold pads on the bottom through to the LCD segments. And here's that mechanism for the battery.

It's quite neat. It's got some uh, strain relief in there for the wires. Possibly could be a bit better, but it's got a large spring in there and that really does work quite well. I Like that.

Okay, okay pal, Pilot 5,000 time. Let's take this out here. Can we? There we go. We pop out the memory card.

There probably didn't have to do that, but just wanted to see if there were any screws under there. And here we go. This should be interesting. We'll see a step up.

We'll see finer pitch components, no doubt. Um, and oh, that's it. Two screws. Oh too easy.

Two screws and some hooks in the top. but looks of it. Probably should get my spudger for that. So it's Copyright Us Robotics 96 and uh, let's see if we can pop this out here.

Looks like there's another There we go. Hey, there we go. it's apart. Tada so it looks like the board might.

Ah, there's another. Is there a screw under there? Yeah, there we go. Pesky. Another screw.

Maybe someone's already had a hack at this because that was already. uh, pulled back. So yeah, there we go. Beautiful.

we're in. Jeez, there's not much one hu. There's a Dragon Ball processor which we'll take a look at. There's probably more on the bottom here.

Flip it out. not much, a little bit more. The first thing I don't like is just the dodgy wires going over to the piso buzzer over there. It's just.

ah. it's just not very nice. It's not elegant at all. Just why don't they use the Spring contact ones like they did on the Scion 2 and many other products would have been much, much better.

But anyway, it's just a single board solution. I Mean there is a second board down in there for the Uh LCD of course, which we'll take a look at, but uh, generally that's apart from the display that is a single board solution. So what we'll do is we'll just pop out the LCD here here so that we can get a better look at this board and separate the two. Actually, this is rather interesting.

They've got this plastic molded Snap-on holder like this and it contains the battery holder in that u-shaped board and there's just a couple of points up. Couple of little tabs up here which looks like that holds that in place and bang that just pops out there like that. So that's and there's they got the Uh Clips on the bottom there where it holds in and that's that's rather quite neat. Um, they've done a bit of thoughtful systems engineering there.

I Rather like that and uh, as as you can see there, you know you really can't design something like this on your own. You can't just throw the design over the wall to the PCB person and say lay out the board. You know it's got to be integral with the 3D mechanical designers. the user interface people, the heaven forbid, the marketing people, and uh, you know all that sort of stuff so you can't Can't really, just do it yourself in an isolated well, what's the wank word? It's a silo, You know.

um, so it's You know, it's rather quite neat. They've gone a little bit of effort there, and then they've put, uh, they've put this, uh, metal battery contact? Is that just snapped? No, that's actually solded onto the board there. So they've created their own, uh, battery holder there, you know, just a mix out of the board and the holder was in the integrated plastic thing. Really quite neat, and there's really not much in this at all.

It really is a system on chip solution. We've got the Dragon Ball, uh, Motorola 68 328 processor there, uh, running at Uh 16. MHz is the back apparently. Uh, we got our 32 khz Crystal Once again, it's not, uh, actually held down with anything so that can vibrate around and if you drop the thing that could, uh, uh, possibly Shear off even though there's not much weight in those, I really prefer it when they, uh, put them down.

But yeah, there's you know, some DC to DC converter stuff here near the battery. There's uh, Rs232 up here, and, uh, not much else. a bit of, um, that's part of the DC to DC converter by the looks of it, and really, not much at all. Um, and they've just got the rubber button strip there directly onto the gold uh pads on the board.

pretty darn common date code 36 we 996. One thing you'll notice on here is the real multitude of test pads. Look at the huge number of test pads there which uh would probably uh test, um allow them to uh uh, test the memory interface to this thing and all these other gold pads there. they're not actually VES cuz the VES are in there and they're tinted.

you can see the uh, the VES are actually tinted there and you've got all these gold test pads so they would have had a huge um, either a dedicated bed of nails uh tester or a flly uh probe tester after the PCB assembly stage that allows them to thoroughly um you know, power this thing up, program it, test it, and uh do the whole works and and there's the processor and as predicted is it is a finer pitch and they have gone greater system on chip here and uh but you know being around 1996 vintage it is still a mix of uh, various, uh you know, sort of. you know standard uh so type packages of the age I mean we've got a Max uh 32 device there for the RS 232 interface interface which is on the as part of the expansion header. Here you know some you know rather large at DC Todc converter stuff. we've got ourselves a Uh super cap there that looks like yeah, that looks like a super Cap instead of a Uh battery I might have to have a better look at that one, but uh, that allows you that allows you to retain all of the Uh state of the Uh CPU when you replace the battery so it can power up exactly where it left off and you might be able to see that written on the cap there.

It's a 5.5 Vol rated 0.1 Farad Super Cap and we've got a Linear Technology Boost converter here that's a Uh LTC 1304 and it's 1.5 volts minimum. you know, 10 microamp standby. Pretty typical device. you'd expect to see um in a two uh, alkaline cell product like this, but it is linear technology and there not exactly Uh noted.

For their low cost, they're one of the highest priced uh, premium supplier boost uh, you know, or DC Todc converter or opamps or whatever on the market. So um, you know, really, they've uh, you know they haven't bothered um, sourcing a really cheap device although I'm not sure what this one is. it's a 45, uh, 4851 and it's an 8 Pin so not quite sure it's probably some other, uh, sort of converter couldn't really, uh, find any data on that at all. And here we have a Linear technology1 1982b and uh, well1 198 is a one Meg sample per second analog to digital converter.

So I'm not sure exactly if it is, uh, that device. not sure exactly why it would be in there, but uh anyway. um, we have another custom device here. very curious.

this one USR which is US Robotics Slpm 160 -37 and clearly that's sort of some sort of custom device and I couldn't find any uh data on it. you Google search that and it turns up with a bunch of you know, one hung low uh suppliers for you know, Ic's and and stuff and couldn't really get any data. So if anyone knows, let us know. po.

possibly some sort of uh, you know, uh, custom logic that actually protects the interface or some sort of you know encoder to ensure that um, this thing's not easy to clone or something like that, perhaps I don't know your guess is as good as mine. Why they'd have a little so package like that, but of course it may actually not be a custom device. it could just be an off-the-shelf device which they got uh, renumbered from the manufacturer. So really, um, we have no clue as to what that is at all.

and the rest of the stuff in here is just a bunch of uh, passives and really, that's it. And as for the display, it is an Opx There It Is Dead Giveaway They're a huge uh one of the premium suppliers of Um LCD displays and this would have been custom designed for them. It's got the touch uh interface. There's a full wire resistive uh touch interface there going over to it and you know the connector here which goes over to the main Uh LCD and some Drive circuitry on there.

It would have been uh uh developed to Speec for Palm / Us robotics. um almost certainly. Now this is interesting. They've actually joined uh two boards together.

Here you can see the split in the board, it goes goes down like this. It's a physically a separate board. so I'm not sure why they uh designed that physically. uh, separate and then they put the uh, you know, then they use this flat Flex on here to join the two boards together.

It's uh, it's rather interesting. Maybe they've done it for some sort of uh fit. You know to make sure it actually uh fit so that they maybe they you know solder this uh hot bar. This is like a hot bar they use a hot bar to um, put this LCD uh, strip down here this flat Flex one.

so they put that down and maybe to make sure it actually lines up with the board on the both. A here, maybe they decided Well we leave have a second board in there so that we can just uh you know, just connect this one separate, then fold the board over and then do another operation which joins the two boards together Anyway, that's uh, that's rather fascinating why they've done that. And they've got a nice big fat copper shielding strap there connecting the metal uh plate underneath to the main circuit. ground and circuitry.

wise, we've just got an LP 324 4, which is the low power version of an LM 334 and another device here. Anyway, I'm not going to bother. look that one up. it's just a obviously a driver for the LCD uh, driving the higher voltage.

Perhaps some sort of Switched uh cap thing or something possibly I don't know. Go look it up. And now we move on to 2003, the HP I pack. And of course that HP uh bought out Palm So this is effectively a Uh would have been done by the same Palm group, although they've totally changed the architecture.

Of course this is a Windows device, but it effectively Um is a follow on uh from the palm and uh, not standard Phillips screws. This time, we' got Torx T6 screws here and a lovely warranty void if broken sticker. H Let's screw that die die. Ah, oh oh jeez, what's going on here? Oh no, that's all.

Oh man. I Thought there'd be like a screw under there. No, there's a it's got some sort of some sort of tab. Oh, that's going to be interesting.

Maybe we have to undo the screws first. W So let's go here. I Expect a higher level of systems integration and uh, finer pitch again. But of course we got a lot more functionality in this.

so there'll be more chipsets again, because there's you know GPS functionality. There's Bluetooth and uh, quite possibly they'll all have their own individual chipset so you can actually expect to see. Although there's tons of system integration in this, you can expect to see uh, more more chips than what we're used to in the other ones cuz they quite simplistic. you know I mean the um, it went from reasonably complex in the uh, you know, reasonably multi-chip solution in the original scon to uh, you know, really single chip, um integration basically apart from the power and support circuitries in the uh Palm there.

but uh, this one I expect will, uh, uh, give us a lot more Hightech stuff you're used to seeing these days. Oh, this could be a real dog. hang on, see if we can somehow crack into this thing. There might be some clips on the side perhaps? yeah, that's looks like what's that looks like the case and uh, so we'll leave off a few of these.

not really, uh, being too kind here to it and hopefully yeah, we've got a couple of Clips in there you can see and wa TDA there it is and there's that warranty void if removes sticker, it's stuck on top of what looks like a BGA device there and uh, it ripped out of the hole in there so there was like an exposed BGA. They've gone to a fair bit of effort there to actually do that, and I'm not sure you know I mean jeez, why are you that concerned with people getting into this thing? What's your what's your deal? So let's peel off that. So they got some black tape around there, not sure what's going on there, and we've got our warranty. Void.

Oh no. sorry. it looked like the top of a BGA but it's not. It's just a bit of foam.

A What Fail. Jeez it. From this distance, and looking at from the Uh on the camera screen there, it did actually look like that. But it's not fooled.

There you go. Just some bloody double-sided tape. Ah, stupid. Why get to all that effort? Really, it's not worth it.

So on the top of the board, we've got our uh expansion header down. here. there's another expansion header up, under, down under there I think and uh, we've got some sort of Samsung device here. We'll take a look at that, some sort of media Q device.

uh, another little uh, another device in there. Let's and we'll take a look at these closer. but Hawk 2 Is that the internal code name? Maybe the Hawk 2? Wo, um, who knows. and the battery contacts their uh surface mount.

Looks like some probably some power stuff over here and we've got our Uh looks like our GPS module up there. So let's take a look at each device in detail. There could be more on the bottom side of the board though, so let's try and get the whole board board out before we do that. Let's take a look at the GPS antenna here and they've just got this little Spring contact here, which when you sandwich the case together like that, just mates with the tiny little uh, coax connector on the top there.

so that's uh, that's rather unusual. They haven't bothered uh, using a proper coax cable for that or anything. they've just got sort of, you know, a contact fit like that as you close the case. Actually come to think of it, looking at this recess cutout in here that's suspiciously the shape of a SIM card and uh, then we've got these contacts down on the board underneath here.

so clearly something, a socket of some uh, description. some sort of Sim type socket was designed to be mounted there and then you know, go through there. so they decided has an after maybe an afterthought to put to fill that in with the warranty void if broken sticker. If you have a look here.

We've got some weird ass two pin connector for the speaker which is mounted which goes down to the front here and that's uh, you know there it is mounted on the front of the unit there and uh, that is looks like there's a ton of stuff on the bottom there. So we really have to get this board out. and here it is. In all its Glory You can see the uh, highspeed uh board to board interconnect layer.

the very low profile thing I can show you that uh, zoomed in later, but we got a ton of stuff on the back there. There's uh, probably the main processor under there and uh, we've got some large, uh, flash memory devices clearly, and um, some SD ram. Maybe another looks like another RF device up there. Maybe that's uh, something to to do with the Bluetooth and uh, we've got the um memory card interface here as well, but there's a ton of stuff on there, so you can really see how we've jumped up in the complexity uh, curve.

And you know, even though there is a ton of ton of system integration on here, they've really ramped it up. I Mean, you know that's uh, not too dissimilar to the density in a uh, modern, uh smartphone for example. And you can see the Dual interfaces here. This board here is uh for one, um, uh type of interface.

I'm not familiar with the Ipac device, so if you've used these before, you know what the expansion headers are for. And this huge expansion header up here is designed of course for the uh Navman uh, GPS um enclosure which I showed on the mail bag. so that's designed to plug into that so um clearly that's you know, like a big Uh docking type connector. major docking connector as opposed to, you know, like a user peripheral interface type thing.

And here's this: Uh board to board interconnect. This will be a highspeed uh thing. You know, like um s Tech and many other companies actually make these highspeed. very low profile, very thin uh board to board interconnect.

so you know there's only a couple of millimeters Pro Fil in there, so you can really, uh, sandwich the boards, sandwich the boards together. and uh, really, that connector adds well. Both connectors Mater together really add no other height. no more height than the regular components on both sides of the board.

and they've used another one of these two pin blade connectors down here like they use for the Uh speaker up there. I showed you and that's a just a little little two pin blade connector. I Have no idea who uh manufactures that I Haven't uh seen that one before? Rev N.7 and we have a day code here 47th week 2002. That's when this thing was manufactured, so it's not actually a 2000 wasn't Well, the PCB itself.

the bare PCB was not manufactured in 2003. it was actually in late 2002. First thing I'm going to do here is lift the hood on this under here should be our main device to and as we already knew, it's a Pxa Uh 25 and that's an X scale processor, an Arm V5 running at 400 MHz at supposedly a core voltage of 1.3 Vols You can see the main Crystal oscillator sitting next to that and that wouldn't be a 400 MHz oscillator that would be like 20 MHz or something like that and then be using internal phase lock Loops to um, uh, boost that up to the required um internal clock rate or clock rates and they've got a battery down in here I'm uh I don't think that would be a rechargeable I think it's probably a uh, it's probably a primary and uh, used for the uh, real time clock perhaps? All right, we'll move around the board and we'll see what we got here. Uh, there's the uh Phono Jack there.

it's you know, probably the biggest Cses thing on this device. We've got a Akm, Ak-45 35 and that's a 16bit uh codak that does all the uh, you know, headphone amp, the mic amp, and uh, all sorts of stuff. It's an I2s audio interface. you know, pretty, uh, bog standard.

uh Cons: you know, system audio device and uh, well, I have no idea what uh, that one is. it's an LC 98 500b. um, clearly it's uh, driving. Something to do with the LCD display there.

so something to do with that, some sort of driver And then we've got ad uh 781 from Analog Devices we got a couple of those. They're actually, um, nothing special. They're quad single pole, single throw switches, so it's just doing some uh, housekeeping stuff there. Not sure what that uh particular package is.

We've got the main processor. of course we've uh, we've got the main uh Dam and uh, flash memory and uh, up here we've got if we can get a look at that, we've got a Max 1748 and that's actually a um LCD uh DC Todc converter. Uh, Hence, you know they got some magnetics around here as well and some uh, external transistors and things. by the looks of it.

um, and over in this part of the board. we've got a National Semiconductor LMX 9814 and that is the Bluetooth uh interface. There's the Um Crystal oscillator for it, and there's the antenna pad. Um, they've got a TCT Listen to that.

that's a little TCT switch there. probably some sort of uh re oh, that's probably uh, goes to the power. That's probably the uh main power switch on the front or something like that. And that's about all she wrote.

for the top part of the board. there's another oscillator module down here. What's that? 3686? mahz? And that's about all for. Well, it's probably the bottom side of the board I guess you could call it and on the top side of the board.

here, we've got a maximum 1702 that's a power management uh controller for the Uh Pxa processor. I Think it's specifically designed for the Pxa processor. so uh, you know it. It generates all the various rails and does the various PowerUp sequences and handles all the power management which um, so many of these modern processors need.

Really, you know you can't just hook them up to 3.3 volts like you can with a you know, pick or an Atmail microcontroller and expect them to work. These things need dedicated power management uh controllers and they you know support interrupts at when they um, you know Brown out and then the voltage drops and Battery detection and all that sort of Um stuff is built in. Um got a Samsung device here. It's an S3 CA 400 I'm not sure what that uh device is probably.

uh, probably some some sort of external memory media Q processor down here. This is a bit of a uh Beast It's got uh, high-speed memory. It does all sorts of things. It's the L it's the main LCD uh controller.

It's got a built-in 64-bit 2 uh, uh, 2D Graphics uh engine for doing various uh graphic stuff. It's got the I2s interface for for the audio. It's got the USB interface for the USB device. It's even got a PCI Um interface as well.

So that's a crazy little powerful UMC chip. And uh, of course we've got the LCD uh, flat Flex cables going over here and the touchcreen as well. And one thing we haven't covered yet is this RF module up here. And by the way, there is Um Irda as well.

So there's the little infrared uh transmitter and receiver on there for good oldfashioned Irda back even in Uh 2003 I think that was, uh, kind of oldfashioned cuz you had that on the Palm Pilot devices as well. Let's pop the hood here on this thing. I took off the screws and uh, that is actually, um, very common to see that sort of, uh, that sort of connector interface on these type of Uh Wireless modules. I've used these before, so it's got a uh, you know, it's just got the bare pads on there and then you've got a board-to-board press fit connector over on there.

but let's take a closer look. Aha! I Completely forgot about the wireless landan capability of this thing. This is an Atml A76 C503 and that's a wireless LAN in a face so got some memory there and all of the Uh RF goodness on the bottom. which of course uh, goes under a shielded.

Of course it. uh, you know we got the shielded Uh can on the top and the shielded can on the bottom as well. This is not the GPS Um, the GPS is in the external Uh Navman interface. Do so all of this is just dedicated to the Uh Wireless LAN interface.

There we've got our looks like a four layer board. We've got the main Atmail processor. You can go check out these if you really want to. There are the various RF devices.

We've got a a couple of 44 MHz uh temperature controlled oscillator. there temperature compensated uh, oscillator and uh various RF drivers and things which go to the antenna which is where over here here. so it pops out. there it is there comes out.

we've got something that's been blobbed under there. They got some red, some red epoxy Gunk on that. but uh yeah, there you go. There's some RF goodness.

So all the RF uh. people out there are getting rather excited or they going. oh that's so 2003. let's try and crack this nav man thing open.

Oh there we go. Oops hey look at that creepy crawly, creepy cly time. We got ourselves an intruder intruder alert intruder alert. Wonder how long he's been there and there's a close up of him.

He's not, uh, not in the best of shape there. Maybe he'll uh jump back to life and uh, come back and bite us? but I don't think so into the bie goes and here is our GPS our Navman uh GPS uh, this would have been uh designed and I believe manufactured uh in New Zealand Cuz it is a navman. So let's take a look at the main chipset. We've got a surf GSP 2E chipset there.

There you go LP 7450 and there's a backup battery. some sort of uh programming, um uh, debug, serial um interface. Possibly that's the maybe the serial output from the uh GPS chipset and down in here. Let's have a look at this if we can get it.

That's another surf chipset down in there, which was uh, so popular back in the day. I'm not sure what rev surf one they're up to, but anyway, there's the external uh antenna connector on it. so it's you know it's pretty much just a two chip interface. They've got the uh uh compact uh flash card here and uh, not much else.

some Terminators there for the bus. Uh, not terribly exciting. Now let's take a look at the antenna. This is interesting.

Now check this out. Look, it's got like a uh, a Myar or a captain type uh, sort of like a flat Flex kind of thing with a uh Helix two Helix kind of. You know. there they go.

They go around there like that and they're solded onto either side down in there. So that's all it is. That is the big whopping, You know? um, you know, old fashioned uh helical antenna on this thing there. it's just like a wrap on a secondary board.

There they've got a just a a controlled impedance uh Trace there and that's all there is to it. Wow. Interesting. So yes, I was not expecting, uh, that at all.

Um, did expect to find a helical antenna here, but not uh on a uh, flexible membrane like that H Fascinating. So there's any RF antenna ham GPS buffins out there. Um, can tell us exactly why they've actually, uh, done that or anyone from uh, Navman for that matter, who would have, uh, likely would have designed this thing. Um, can you tell us the benefits of having that, uh, having it as a membrane like that and exactly, um, the performance, uh, advantages of doing that.

And yes, of course it is made by our kiwi Brothers in New Zealand Hey to all my New Zealand viewers and on the bottom of the board, well, you know, not much excitement there. just another memory device and that's it. So there you have it. That was pretty epic I think we had nearly two decades worth of PDA personal digital assistant technology there starting from the site classic uh S 2 which pretty much uh, started all very crude device through to the uh, very popular Palm Pilots at the time, through to the you know, the Uh Windows compatible, you know, pocket uh PCS that's what it was all about.

Uh, back in the early to mid 2000s just before the smartphones really just absolutely murdered these devices. Nobody, uh, wanted them anymore and it was interesting to see the technology progress from. you know, very crude sort of. you know, 0.1 in sort of.

you know you could design this in uh, the freear version of Eagle uh kind of thing through to you know, a more, um, basically a you know, pretty much a single chip uh solution in the PM poet through to very complicated. you know, just as complicated as uh, you know today's smartphones really. With all the integrated Wireless uh technology uh built in and the super fast processes, you know that's not too dissimilar to what we have today in our current smartphones, but that's designed to run the Windows operating system so you know the mobile edition, so that's a rather interesting look at Progressive technology there. I Found that rather fascinating.

I Don't know how long this went for, but it's a quite some time so we'll leave it there. and uh, if you want to discuss any of this stuff, jump on over to the E blog. Forum The thread is there. Uh, for each one of these videos, you can jump directly to the thread and as always, if you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up.

Catch you next time.