How to open your scroll

[JimmyW]

When I've finished stripping it to the bare bones and having every bit of it documented and photographed I'll happily provide full res images for download mojo

Just for reference the main PCB is labelled:

INET Co-S1008-v1.1 ZL 2010-10-12

[barrelockingnut]

Bloody Good Work !!
If it wasnt exactly mission impossible,it definitely was mission improbable !!

[JimmyW]

Not the hardest 40 seconds I've ever spent... now to change the utterly crap antenna in there for a wifi antenna connector through the casing for a proper beefy antenna attachment,..

[mojo]

now to change the utterly crap antenna in there for a wifi antenna connector through the casing for a proper beefy antenna attachment,..

yes please!

[Kommander]

Jimmy,

Correct me if i'm wrong, but the picture looks like CON1 rather than COM1 (which would suggest USB, plus with the 4 solder points would also suggest the same tbh). Plus COM tends to relate only to serial ports so CON (shortened CONnection maybe?) might make more sense, definately interesting though! Have you got a spare USB cable you can cannibalise and test with? Would be interesting to see if it works as a bus or host port or something completely different.

When you check the CPU, let us know if there's any room for minor heatpipe cooling or not - would be interesting for overclocking purposes

[mojo]

i'd use a multimeter first
i'm guessing its there for a purpose, which was denied due to cost/development time, perhaps the elusive bluetooth function was on a separate board altogether and just mounted there? if only we had the complete datasheets :-/

[Fraz]

Quality report on the "internals" of the scroll, but lets not forget we have a relatively cheap android device, its one thing to mess with the firmware but to mess with the hardware ?????? Although the results would be interesting i very much doubt that the majority of members would have the knowledge let alone the guts to tinker with soldering irons. Having said that your investigations are valuable to the forum so please dont be put off. Stick in Jimmy.....

[mojo]

back in the day i had an I-Mate JAM smartphone with 64mb ram
a few months later I-Mate released a 128mb JAM
thanks to a genius on the XDA-forums who got handy with a soldering iron and posted a complete guide on how to replace the lowly 64 with the later 128 chip i got my first taste of hardware modding a smartphone

man i felt so cool after completing the conversion

i'm well up for delving into the scrolls hardware, i dont see it any more challenging then modding my Eeepc, but despite having been doing this for several years, my soldering skills still suck

should be interesting...but then it all depends on the simplicity/difficulty of the mods...as jimmyW said, turning the camera around to a rear-facing camera could be a very simple mod to do, and very, very effective...

[Fonefixer]

I have to agree with Kommander. Ive just taken mine to bits and CON1 does indeed look like the base for a usb connector or a daughter board, given the size of the connection pads.

Im going to try and work out the surrounding circuitry there and where I think the bluetooth should be. As for the battery, will be easy to change but im not sure how much bigger I can go, given the space available.

As for the wifi antenna, I have a few ideas that might not need an external one. Going to take it in to work today, have a tweak and take a few measurements. Time to get out the magnifier, hakko and meter methinks.....

[mojo]

i'm really liking this explosion of activity here, hats off to you guys
bluetooth (even just a miniture dongle hardwired in) would be awesome, ive got a bluetooth tomtom GPS box kicking around thats crying out to be used in my car-build