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Stage 1: DiscoveryOkay, I may be crazy Yes, I took my one week old brand new $600 phone apart, and started soldering to the circuit board, and scraping away unwanted old circuitry. Here's some early photos to show the internals, and my bluetooth chip. Looking inside the i500 Even for surface mount this stuff is tiny. Those diodes and base resistors are SMALLER than the head of a pin. This photo is the 'back' of the circuit board as viewed from the battery (the part that faces the numbers).
Here is the part facing the rear of the phone. Yes, that's a two sided surface mount board, with mostly all integrated units. One heck of a daunting task to mod...
Take a look at the ringer speaker, and vibrator. Cool new disk style design-- no visible parts. Not quite as good a vibration, but awesome space spaver. The speaker is on the left, BTW.
No chance of anything in the case without a new back. You see the white part in the photo-- that's the sprint sticker. The back of the phone is about the thickness of 1 to 1.5 pieces of standard paper. All mods will need to be external, or a new case built.
The First Modifications Okay, I did it, I soldered to the main circuit board, after taking an Exacto to the parts I didn't need/want. This will let me extend the hardware to add integrated bluetooth and a speakerphone. Without getting too deep, the cable connects to the voice hardware, so I can encode it for BT and amp it for the speakerphone-- as well as internally to the Palm port so I can use the serial protocol for my Bluetooth module for a wireless modem, or external storage/MP3/etc. No internal shots, I was in a hurry to get my phone back working at this point, since I needed it. This is my normal phone after-all.
Here's my bluetooth mod chip, nearing completion. Ooohhh... surface mount is cool. :) 2mm total thickness for the whole circuit! :) That's an acceptable size-- a smaller difference than the slim to standard batteries. The Bluetooth SMT chipset is from Windigo systems, a pretty cool company. Smaller than the battery in the X and Y dimensions...
Only 2mm thick in the z dimension, that will mount nicely.
Continue to Stage 2-- building the case _Scott |
