I've bought a new toy, it's one of those little 7" laptops which run Windows CE.
No, that doesn't sound much fun. However, when you look at what it actually is, you realise why it's a little more fun than you might think...
As you can see, the first thing I did was take it apart to get to the interesting bit. The motherboard!
Yep, that's a wifi dongle on that wire. It was passed up through the hinge and stuck (with sticky pads) to the top left of the case where there was a space. I guess that was to improve range. (Many other boards I've seen have the dongle stuck to the motherboard instead - you'll see why this one isn't like that in the next few photos).
This is the interesting side. Notice the small black square on the left hand side. It's a USB port as a 4-pin header. What might plug in there one might think? Well this is what I took out of it:
Yes, it's just a USB flash disk with a pin header rather than a USB port. This would possibly be a cost saving to the manufacturers over the NAND chip which they had in previous models? That's the only explanation I can think of, but it doesn't make sense, as the USB flash drive has a NAND chip of the same pinout as the empty socket on the CPU daughterboard, as seen below.
This picture's got a number of interesting things in it. The bottom right shows a 4 pin connector, this is the serial port. I've made up a level shifter so I can inspect what's going on from another computer, but it could be useful for other things in the future... The other interesting thing in this picture is the JTAG pins just below the CPU. These are of great interest to me currently as I've managed to mess up the contents of the SPI flash chip (the chip to the left of the pins, a 250401 - 512Kbit, similar to a W25X40 which some of these laptops use instead). JTAG will allow me to rewrite the bootloader (hopefully!) and be on my merry way again.
When it does work, I intend on hacking a few extra peripherals onto it, mainly via. USB. I've found that you can get
USB Hubs without ports soldered onto them which should be easy to hack apart and fit into some unused space. Despite this laptop being incredibly small, there's still quite a lot of space to play with. The only concerns I have are heat and battery life... But I should be able to replace the flash disk with
the guts of something like this and add a
tiny bluetooth dongle.
The next steps from there are proper kernel drivers for power management and a bigger battery.
That should whet my appetite for now, and hopefully yours too. Why not follow my blog to see if anything interesting amounts from this acquisition. I'll certainly be adding more pictures soon!
