Hi welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics Design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi What's more interesting than the new? I River story HD eBook Reader: Well, what's inside of it? That's what you know what we say here on the Eev blog. Don't turn it on. Take it apart.

Let's see if we can take this sucker apart, shall we? What have we got on the back here? Well, it was, uh, fairly obvious from the start that there's a couple of Phillips head screws under the SD card cover there. So, uh, I'm not sure I'm going to assume that they're part of it and these feet uh, down here are a dead giveaway and they certainly pop out as you expect and there's another Philips head screwdriver in there. so let's take those four screws out. Uh, I expect there to possibly this uh end might have to pry open with a spudger bar or something like that, but we'll give it a go.

Yeah, this looks very promising I just pried that open with my spudger and uh, sure enough, there's a little plastic side clip. so I Expect there to be those similar sort of side clips all the way around the side just like on the Kindle and sure enough, we have three of them along the bottom. Edge Like that, let's try and find the others on the side and the top end and we've got no less than five at the top end here. 1, 2, 3, 4, five.

and the sides are a bit harder to get out, but there's 1, 2, three, four there on the right hand side and the left hand side. We got one, 2, 3, 4, five, six. and yeah, the sides are just a little bit tighter. but uh, if we open it up Bingo it just pops open like that.

Let's take a look inside. It's not nearly as interesting really as the Kindle, but that's uh, to be expected. It's a bit less uh feature pack, but it's got all the basic stuff you would expect. It's got the large lithium ion battery here.

We'll take a look at the PCB we'll take a look at in detail. It's a single sided uh load that gets their manufacturing cost down. There's the membrane over here, which goes to the Um to the Eink display. There's another membrane which goes over to the keypad on the front the back panel.

Nothing's happening there and no, there is no RFID tag uh built in to that at all. The main uh PCB is is pretty much. um, it. There's an antenna that uh runs that's your Wi-Fi antenna up there.

We'll take a look in more detail. the switch down here. Nothing really happening. uh there at all that is.

That's just uh, boring as it just slides across the spring itself self is built in to the slide switch down here on the main board. so uh, you can still operate uh the unit when the back covers off. No problems at all. One Curious Thing is the large amount of free space around here.

and because the battery is not really, uh, held in with anything not really contained with anything there, it's just sort of, uh, double stuck down with double-sided tape I'm assuming um I can't see any reason why you couldn't replace that with a uh, larger one and um, of the same uh type of course, so that the battery charging technology is compatible. Um, but if you got the same uh type and you actually uh, hacked out actually, uh, dremeled out these um, these walls here in the back case, you could actually fit a larger capacity battery in there I Think no surprises with the battery at all. It's a 3.7 volt lithium ion nominal 6.7 uh wat hour or 1,800 milliamp hours. And the tape over the end like this is a dead giveaway that they've actually got uh, built-in protection circuitry into the battery.

uh, that's a musthave in uh. consumer devices like this was a fairly large capacity. I mean 6.7 W is a fairly large capacity battery, so if we actually peeled back that tape, we'd see the protection circuitry in there. Let's take a look at the main board up close and of course, sitting right in the middle is the Um scale IMX 508 uh Cortex Arm Processor quite a powerful uh low power Beast very common in uh, these ebook, uh readers and other uh, low power products like that.

This device here is the 2 GB uh Nand flash memory. It's a Samsung KLM 2G 1D Eh, uh. device there? another Samsung device up here, presumably another Uh flash memory. It's a K4x X 1G 323 from what I can see.

Um I don't know what that one is off hand down here. We've got another free scale part and it is an Uh MC 13892 and it's a Pmu, a power management unit. It's got all sorts of stuff built in it. It uh, it's It's a companion device to the Um Arm Cortex processor up there.

It's got built-in battery charging. It's got cool counting for knowing how much uh battery you've got left. It's got a real time clock and a whole bunch of DC Todc converters and voltage Regulators to power the cores inside the processor and things like that. So it's a it's a very essential Uh chip.

and as you can see, there's a lot of um, analog stuff surrounding that. We've got the Mini USB connector here. There's a small cut out in the board for that. uh, there's another small device over here I'm not actually sure what that is.

probably unimportant. Now, curiously, there is a spare connector here, a flat Flex connector, and uh, they haven't populated that part. so I'm not sure what the deal was there. In fact, there's quite a lot of unpopulated footprints all around here.

Quite a lot indeed. I'm not actually sure what the deal is there. Now here's the main flat Flex connector over on this side, which goes down to the uh keypad. the front panel uh, quiry keypad.

If we look up the top here, we've got the wifi chipset. No surprises. and uh, atheros. um I think it's an AR 61026 that's what I'm reading on there.

Um I think they used a Sim very similar one. or they use the same brand one in the Kindle No surprises at all. and uh, they're using a little micro UFL coax connector to go up to the WiFi antenna. which, uh, just sits in its own little thing there, that's just a little uh, strip of um circuit board little PCB Mount uh antenna.

very common and around the free scale processor up here. Um, quite a few unpopulated parts as well. There's the main uh Crystal oscillator and uh, there are a few uh, test points as well. there.

There you go those gold uh pads in there. they're labeled as test points, but of course, uh, they're highly likely to be um, access points for the JTAG and things like that cuz they have to uh, program these devices once they're in there. So um, but I don't see any labeling for that or any sort of, um, easy access. uh JTAG JTAG connector for hacking and up in the top left corner here, we've got our E in display controller now.

I Believe it's an Epson um I'm reading a TP 36518 but don't quote me on that. Uh, very unsurprising. Epson make a lot of uh E in uh E in display controllers um I believe they use one in the Kindle as well. And of course, we've got our flat Flex uh PCB here as well.

There's a couple of decoupling capacitors on there and you'll notice that the, uh that it's actually got a designed date um, just before Christmas 2010. So there you go. So there you have it. That's it.

Uh, pretty basic. It's got, uh, nothing more than uh, what? I expected. No, um, bells and whistles at all. but uh, it's it's reasonably well made I Have no problems with it whatsoever.

The the predominant, uh, the components are predominantly Um 402. Uh, they haven't gone any smaller than that. Uh, they could have even gone for 0603 if they wanted to, to, uh, possibly increase their manufacturing yield. but uh, these sort of.

you know, 0402 is no problem these days. So really, it's uh, not a bad, uh, design whatsoever. The layout is quite good. You can see they've actually panelized it down here.

They've got the cutouts, um, well, the actual breakout um tabs for the penalization of the board. Why they've actually done a cut out there and shaped it like that? Your guess is as good as mine. and I don't see any reset switch on here either. and you really have to wonder what happens when you disconnect the battery.

Well, there's only one way to find out and it's disconnected. and of course, the Uh display is still there. It's still going because it's an Eink display. It doesn't need any power to retain the last image, so I'll leave that for a little bit and uh, there's no major capacitance on the board, so it should have already.

shouldn't have uh held a charge really at all. and I'll reconnect that and see, um, if it boots up from scratch. Yep, there we go. We've uh, it's reset itself I plugged it back in and it looks like it's just going into that reboot process and it's booting up.

There we go. and yep, we're back in. We haven't lost anything. Everything seems sweet, no problems whatsoever.

Hack away and just like the Kindle I was able to actually reset the thing with without removing the battery, but just by holding down the power switch for uh, 10 seconds and then turning it on and that, uh, puts it into a cold reset exactly like you've taken out the battery, presumably taking out. The PCB was pretty easy. Just half a dozen screws or so and it just, uh, lifts out and we can take a look at the hinged switch mechanism here. It's not terribly, uh, exciting.

not much to write home about, but um, there you go. That's the swing mechanism. it's built in and if we bring the piece in over here, we can see that the there's the Um tactile switches on the bottom of the board there, so they're just too standard. uh, like a I think they're a Panasonic uh brand one if um, memory serves me correctly and they're just a little tiny uh membrane, um Dome type one.

So there you go. A pretty basic uh switch implementation. um I don't know how many, um, how many presses they're actually rated for, but I assume they're quite significant. They wouldn't have used one that only had like 10,000 Cycles or something like that.

I'm sure they would have uh, chosen, um, some uh, tactile domes and switches that had in the order of millions of uh uh switch actuation. and there's a few interesting uh labeled test points on this board. They've got, uh, all the various power supply voltages you can see there 3.33 and 1.8 uh for the white II And over here there's a couple of interesting ones: Boot Mode zero and Boot Mode One I'm not sure what they do, but uh, if you want to have a play around with those, that would be uh, interesting. and uh, there's a power key.

There's a digital 1.2 supplies. There's various Uh supplies in this um on this board for the Uh processor and the various chipsets. but unlike the Kindle which had its uh easy access serial Uh connector on the side of the case which allowed you to access uh, the boot ROM of the system allowed you access the actual command kernel of the thing I can't uh, find any equivalent Um serial, uh, serial monitor type Uh interface on this board. There may be one there labeled as one of the test points, but yeah, it doesn't look um as easy to hack as the Kindle was and a few extra screws Gets the Uh back plate panel out and we can access the Uh keypad and the LCD itself.

And nothing really surprising there in terms of the Uh key switch um uh, overlay there. pretty pretty basic uh stuff. And if we have a look at the LCD itself up here, we can see you can see my boom mic there in the Uh in the reflection on the mirrored finish on the back. There we can uh see the membrane going into the Uh LCD uh, the Eink sorry eink uh panel display which is made by LG um and up the top you can actually see the Uh the chip on board drivers there.

You can actually see them embedded into the actual panel itself and they're those tiny little they. they're actually uh, they're actually silicon chips embedded in the panel itself which drives. They actually drive all the individual rows and Columns of the Eink display. It's rather fascinating.

uh, construction these things. but uh, ultimately there's uh, there's not much to them at all. It's uh, very. um, typical of a standard um row column LCD Dot matrix uh driver system really.

And we have a bare PCB manufacturing date of the 20th week 11 here for my particular unit. Well, that's it for the tear down I Hope you found it interesting. and uh, if you want to see the highres, uh, photos of this, go on over to my uh flicker account. uh, the links on my blog website and don't forget to subscribe rate thumbs up.

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