Teardown Of A USB-C Cable With Integrated LCD

October 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

The past years we have been seeing screens pop up in many new places, but seeing them in USB-C cables is still a bit of a novel thing. Out of sheer curiosity [Aaron Christophel] recently took apart one of these, to see what’s inside and what else you can do with them beyond fondling its single touch control and watch reported voltages and current.

Naturally, these devices aren’t exactly meant to be serviced by anyone, so the biggest challenge is to get into them without too much violence. Risking a blood sacrifice to the Hardware Gods, [Aaron] first attacks the display cover of this €15, 240 Watt-rated UGreen cable with sharp utensils before just taking apart the aluminium case, which ultimately gets him inside.

After this it’s clear that attacking the display cover was the right way, just requiring knowing where to apply pressure in order to invert the assembly process. Following that it’s less clear how it was assembled, though it may have involved liberal amounts of glue after sliding in the components. Rather than bothering with applying heat, instead some side-cutters quickly take care of that pesky aluminium shell.

The tiny IPS LC display is attached via a flat flex cable to the PCB with a connector, with the PCB featuring multiple voltage regulators, a MOSFET for the backlight and other parts in addition to the EN32LF056 marked MCU. After some prodding on the exposed SWD interface, it was confirmed to be a Cortex-M0+-based MCU with 64 kB of Flash and 4 kB of SRAM, which made it easy enough to use the little display to display some video frames of everyone’s favorite artist.

Since this MCU is only wired up to measure currents and voltages it cannot use the USB interface, but with some knowledge of how to non-destructively disassemble one of these connectors at least to the point of accessing the SWD pads underneath the display it could be a fun party trick to reflash the firmware with something custom.

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The Game Boy Test Lab Provides A Cartridge-Sized Diagnostic Lab

October 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Most of the time when you see a repair video of a Game Boy it’ll be demonstrated with a cartridge inserted and booting up into the game, but does this actually mean that the system is truely fully functional? There can still be more intermittent faults, dodgy buttons, or even something like a defective link port — all of which can be much harder to detect than firing up a copy of Tetris. This is where the GB Test Lab cartridge by [Marcel Pflug] of the Game Boy Museum comes into play.

With the freely available ROM put on an EverDrive or similar flash cartridge, you can test a whole range of functions of the original Game Boy (DMG-01), most of them autonomously and some with some user input.

This is similar to the test cartridge that Nintendo themselves used in the form of the DMG-AGING-01, which validated the basic functionality of the handheld. Since then a myriad of test cartridges have been created by the homebrew community, but not all try to test quite literally everything possible. In the case of the GB Test Lab this includes the typical like CPU, RAM, interrupts, etc., but also key bounce time, intermittent connectivity and playing a game of Pong between two GBs connected by link cable as well as using the GB Printer.

Results are saved per GB and persisted if the flash cartridge has battery backup or similar. Overall it seems quite comprehensive and something that’s worth giving a shot if you’re the kind of person who owns one or more GBs. Perhaps the neatest part of this ROM is that it also contains a built-in reference for all the components and other useful details, including how to interpret results and symptoms.