IPhone 4 Teardown

June 23, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 36 Comments

iFixit traveled all the way to Japan to bring you this iPhone 4 teardown, only to be shipped the device unexpectedly two days early!

We were surprised that the A4 processor (its naked body displayed for the world this past April) contained within the iPhone 4 had 512MB of ram, compared to the 256MB of the iPad. Other features include the 1420mAh battery (201mAh more than the 3Gs), 5MP rear camera and front VGA camera, and the use of micro-sim.

Frankly, we don’t see ourselves getting the device immediately, but how excited are you for the iPhone 4?

Dingoo A320 RAM Upgrade

June 10, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

[Stephanie] beefed up the hardware on her Dingoo A320. She enjoyed the features that the A320 handheld gaming system offered, but wanted the 64mb of RAM available in its bigger brother, the A330. A comparison of the two led her to believe a swap might be possible and after sourcing a pair of replacement chips for $12.50 she took the plunge. Once the solder had cooled it was just a matter of flashing some different firmware to take advantage of the upgrade.

[Thanks Juan via Dingoonity]

Adding RAM To The Nexus One Without Soldering

May 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Want 21 megabytes more ram in your Nexus One? [Coolbho3000] worked out a way to tweak the kernel and remap memory usage to free up some resources. That means this comes as a custom kernel image requiring no hardware alteration. Try it out and share your experiences in the comments. But if you don’t need more ram you can just upgrade to the most recent kernel.

[Thanks Juan]

Storage For Your Hacking Needs

March 14, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 18 Comments

Sometimes your project needs a lot of non-volatile ROM, right on cue [Matthew] let us know how to not only connect, interface, read, and write to SD cards with a PIC over serial, but also how to do the above mentioned with an old PATA HDD. For those without a PIC/serial connection don’t fret, [nada] let us know about his Bus Pirate SD card hack, of which our personal favorite part is the creative use of an old 5.25″ floppy connector as the SD card socket.

Double The RAM On D-Link Router

September 19, 2009 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

d-link_double_ram

[Pelaca] upgraded the RAM on his D-Link DIR-320 router from 32MB to 64MB. This hack is simple enough: swap out the existing RAM chip for another one and change the bios to make use of the upgrade. The actual execution is not that simple because of the pitch of the TSOP II package; you’ll need to bring your mad soldering skills to pull this off.

This reminds us of when upgrading original Xbox RAM to 128MB was all the rage. It involved the same type of hack, adding four memory chips to unpopulated positions on the motherboard. The forums are thick with people complaining that their box not working after a failed upgrade attempt. Hopefully you’ll have better luck.

[Thanks Juan]

Visual Hardware Identification Guide

July 18, 2009 by Eliot 32 Comments

hardwareguide

Check out this visual hardware guide from deviantART member [Sonic840]. It has everything from memory modules, to bus sockets, to power connectors, to an entire array of CPU sockets that have been used over the years. You’re bound to see something in there you didn’t know existed.

[via Gizmodo]

Parts: 32KB SPI SRAM Memory (23K256)

March 2, 2009 by Ian 15 Comments

23k256ii

Microchip’s new 23K256 is a serially interfaced 32 kilobyte SRAM memory chip, available in 8 pin DIP and 8 pin SO packages. SRAM, like EEPROM, is a data storage medium. Data stored in SRAM is lost without constant power, but it’s really fast and there’s no limits to the number of write cycles. EERPOM stores data even without power, but it’s slow and usually limited to around a million write cycles.

32K SRAM chips typically have 15 address lines and 8 data lines, like the IS61LV256AL we used on our CPLD development board. The 23K256 requires just four signal lines, but sacrifices the speed of a parallel memory interface. It’s a great way to add extra memory to a low-pin count microcontroller without routing 23 signal traces. We’ll show you how to interface this chip below.

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