Database Users

Looking to upgrade ram on HTC Wizard! Anyone know how?

Hello,
I've recently acquired a lazer welder that can weld metal-to-metal at a 0.1mm pitch.
What I am trying to do is cut of the old RAM chip and weld on a new higher capacity RAM chip.
Knowing I have the means to adhere a chunk of memory onto the board, does ANYONE out there know if:
1.) It's Possible
2.) If it is possible, is there a none OEM way of buying "1" chip at a reasonable price
3.) Could I buy a PC stick of ram that is of the same charecteristics of the chip used in the wizard to lop off the legs and than weld onto the wizard?
Anyone know where I can find some documentation of what is inside the wizard. Like all of the IC's?
Thanks!

I'm sure i remember a while back someone trying this, but I'm sure they ran into problems with the on board controller that recognises the memory. I'll see if I can find the links and post them here.

supraman said:
Hello,
I've recently acquired a lazer welder that can weld metal-to-metal at a 0.1mm pitch.
What I am trying to do is cut of the old RAM chip and weld on a new higher capacity RAM chip.
Knowing I have the means to adhere a chunk of memory onto the board, does ANYONE out there know if:
1.) It's Possible
2.) If it is possible, is there a none OEM way of buying "1" chip at a reasonable price
3.) Could I buy a PC stick of ram that is of the same charecteristics of the chip used in the wizard to lop off the legs and than weld onto the wizard?
Anyone know where I can find some documentation of what is inside the wizard. Like all of the IC's?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm almost positive that the RAM in the Wizard is going to be some sort of BGA format. That doesn't lend itself to easy soldering, although it can be done with the right tools. A laser welder isn't the right tool.
The other problem that you'll face is that you would need to purchase memory chips from the same manufacturer, using the same packaging as the original memory so that the ball pitch will be the same and the signal assignments will be the same.
Complicating the issue is the fact that higher density memory chips use more address lines - the Wizard may not have the extra address lines to support more memory. I wouldn't expect the device to have more address lines than necessary simply because of the space requirements. If the target was 64MB of RAM, then the space required for an extra address line to support 128MB could be better used for other motherboard features.
I hate to be such a gloomy gus, but, sadly, the sort of electrical tinkering that we used to do on some of the original PDAs is pretty much a thing of the past due to space constraints and machine assembly optimizations that the manufacturers have implemented.
But, if nothing else, it would be interesting to know just what HTC put in the Wizard!

Hey i think and have hard from some people that Wizard can support 128MB RAM, a frnd of mine was telling me that he has seen some people written on some other forum that the upgrade was a success but a limitation is that Wizard wil not support a RAM greater than 128MB its MAX. If you do try tell us your experience. and DO at your own risk dont blame anyone else if you screw your Wizard. TC

It is possible to upgrade the memory on the wizard, theres a company that will do it for you but its expensive and youd probably be better of buying higher spec model.
I came across a topic a while back that someone had succesfully done it themselfs, but it was very tricky and the right soldering equipment was needed to solder the chip correctly to the board.

Can the 1gb internal memory be swapped out?

Does anyone know how difficult it would be to swap out the internal 1gb of memory with, say a 16gb from another Galaxy S?
Would it just be a matter disassembly, unsoldering and replacing? How small are the memory traces? Wire count?

Unless you worked for samsung and had access to the chip (then you wouldn't be here asking), You would have to buy another phone and disable it. Hoping that its capatible and having the right tools so you don't mess up the phone.
Not worth it.
Unless you just have the money to blow. I'm guessing the hardware is different in the epic. Footprint and all...

Thanks for your thoughts. This might be a hack a year from now when people are moving on to new phones. I guess I can look at a tear down video of the Epic and compare it to a tear down video of one of its siblings and visually compare the memory chips when both videos are out.

The internal memory is likely soldered to the main board.
Theoretically if you were feeling especially dexterous and were able to desolder the chip and attach a larger one in it's place, you would still likely need some firmware changes to be able t access the larger space. Even then I doubt the memory on the other Galaxy S phones is comprised of a single 16GB chip. It's likely several smaller chips.
tl;dr no

HD2 mainboard component missing

Hi,could anyone with knowledge confirm what component is it?
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
It fall off pcb,and i could not find it

Refreshing post

b.u.m.p #2

how do u know something is missing? maybe there was nothing there to begin with.... does the phone not work when u put it back together?
edit: after searching a bit i found a couple pictures that shows the HD2's motherboard and some show a black component there and some dont. see attached pics. so maybe yours didnt have anything there to begin with. these components are soldiered onto the board, components dont just fall off...
maybe it depends if your phone is a US or EURO model?
rlee

here you can buy a new one
go on cgi.ebay.de and put this following link behind
/Mainboard-Motherboard-For-HTC-hd2-leo-T8585-/260819122167?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cba07f7f7[/url]

tamerkilinc said:
here you can buy a new one
go on cgi.ebay.de and put this following link behind
/Mainboard-Motherboard-For-HTC-hd2-leo-T8585-/260819122167?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cba07f7f7[/url]
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
does it has to be cgi.ebay.de?or can i use .com? bwwwwahaha,price is awesome
Well,component was stripped with screwdriver,not by me.
Btw,it is US version

Empty places on boards are not unusual. Have a look on your PC's mainboard, I bet you'll find several of them there, too.
The reasons vary. At times it is because some feature originally was planned, but didn't make it into production. Redesigning the board costs much more than simply letting out some parts.
But most of the times it is due to variations of the hardware. Some chips need external parts while other, doing the same job, don't.
When you have to produce millions of a device, you have to consider that occasionally you can't use the exact chip types in all devices and partially have to use other compatible chips. So most boards are designed to cover several variants of equipment - where chip A needs this specific external piece, while chip B, which is soldered to your board, doesn't.
If your phone works flawlessly, then the empty space is ok, no reason to change anything.
If there really has been a chip on the empty place, there are explicit marks on the soldering pads. Are their surfaces clean and shiny? Then there has never been anything soldered to it, otherwise they have a rough surface, clearly showing that something was ripped off. This can happen if the soldering process was bad. But this happens really rarely, especially in upper class smartphones.
(Had this on a PC RAM some years ago, the EEPROM simply fell off the board... and some of the good old Nokia 6210 had problems with bad soldering, but this affected only a few pins of a single chip.)
So if you can post a macro pic of the empty place, I can have a look and tell you if there has been anything on it or not.

justmeandmyphone said:
Empty places on boards are not unusual. Have a look on your PC's mainboard, I bet you'll find several of them there, too.
The reasons vary. At times it is because some feature originally was planned, but didn't make it into production. Redesigning the board costs much more than simply letting out some parts.
But most of the times it is due to variations of the hardware. Some chips need external parts while other, doing the same job, don't.
When you have to produce millions of a device, you have to consider that occasionally you can't use the exact chip types in all devices and partially have to use other compatible chips. So most boards are designed to cover several variants of equipment - where chip A needs this specific external piece, while chip B, which is soldered to your board, doesn't.
If your phone works flawlessly, then the empty space is ok, no reason to change anything.
If there really has been a chip on the empty place, there are explicit marks on the soldering pads. Are their surfaces clean and shiny? Then there has never been anything soldered to it, otherwise they have a rough surface, clearly showing that something was ripped off. This can happen if the soldering process was bad. But this happens really rarely, especially in upper class smartphones.
(Had this on a PC RAM some years ago, the EEPROM simply fell off the board... and some of the good old Nokia 6210 had problems with bad soldering, but this affected only a few pins of a single chip.)
So if you can post a macro pic of the empty place, I can have a look and tell you if there has been anything on it or not.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here,i added best macro i could get

Looks to me as if the pads are virgins, have never seen any solder. So if your phone doesn't have any malfunction, everything should be fine.

This component is smd female plug for led power thanks everyone for comments,maybe someone will have use of this...
Sent from my Milestone using XDA App

Are the PA for HTC Touch HD2 from Avago?

Unpopulated Micro SD slot!?

I am not really sure if this is a SD card slot, because I did not measure 3.3volts at the terminals, also not in recovery (not sure if micro sd card is powered up as soon as the phone is).
Really strange because why have they left it out of the phone?
My Z1 is dead. SoC is dead.. I ordered a "brand new never used before" mainboard with discount so my parts get a second round.. I will try to root that one unlock bootloader and dump sdcard and run photorec to see how truly true that statement of the seller was about being "new". Anyways that's it for now..
Here are some pictures

Most manufacturers design their pcb's for multi purposes. I know it from Nokia, Siemens and also nowadays. You design one pcb for 3 devices and not 3 for each of the them to save design and production costs.

strongst said:
Most manufacturers design their pcb's for multi purposes. I know it from Nokia, Siemens and also nowadays. You design one pcb for 3 devices and not 3 for each of the them to save design and production costs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Makes sense, but why did they not just add sd card support to the phone? Is this to safe cost or to keep the design the way they wanted it?
I think the cost of adding it is so small. Why bother, just mill the frame and solder the socket on. But in this case, pads where not connected so maybe it's sth else.

NiTrOwow said:
Makes sense, but why did they not just add sd card support to the phone? Is this to safe cost or to keep the design they way they wanted it?
I think the cost of adding it is so small. Why bother, just mill the frame and solder the socket on. But in this case, pads where not connected so maybe it's sth else.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pads are not connected cause of my mentioned reasons maybe and yes, Design is one of the possible reasons too!
From design a board to release of the final design for the smartphone there's a huge time that can go past. So they don't design a new pcb if pr says: we don't want a sd card.
They just disable them, cause the smartphone must be released.

Priv-like Android device building

Hi everyone,
I own a Priv and can't do without a keyboard. Seeing that (as of today) no new portrait slider has been announced, and modding the motherboard itself is unrealisitic, I've decided to find a motherboard and screen off a newer phone and sort-of slap them on a spare chassis I've got lying around.
Feel free to add suggestions and comments below, I need all the expertise I can get. Hit the like button if you're interested, so i can get a head-count. If you guys and gals are interested, I'll post pics as I go along.

Keyboard & Interface:
In an ideal world, I'd be using the priv's existing (and exquisite) PKB which also has touch capabilities for scrolling and moving the cursor. Unfortunately I've not yet found the pinouts for that (and is more complex to interface). I have however found a website where a good soul published info and diagrams for a Q10's Keyboard and then connected those to an IC using a board with a Hirose connector (which he then connected to a raspberry pi project). My plan is similar. Since I don't know at which point in the motherboard I can make an input for a keyboard, the best strategy is to wire the keyboard's interface chip into the USB connections, as Android natively supports USB keyboards and mice. I can then use a microswitch (mechanical or magnetic) to disconnect the keyboard's signal when the slider closes.
If someone does know the pinouts of the Priv's connector, do let me know, it would be great to be able to use it!

Motherboard & Screen:
First thing that springs to mind, is that since the screen will be sliding a couple of inches, the phone off which I'll take the screen and motherboard needs to have a long flex-ribbon, usually found when a motherboard is on the top, and the screen connects on the bottom (such as the oneplus 5). This also means the charging port would also be nice to be a separate unit. I'm not too worried about cooling as there's a nice big metal slider frame to which all this will stick on, but failing that, i could also make a metal back with shallow fins to dissipate heat. The less features there are directly on the screen, the less things are likely to fail.

Requirements:
So the basic point of all this is to have the keyboard hooked up to the motherboard of a rootable system which can be easily modified. Phones like Xiaomi, Oneplus ... fit this bill well. First thing that springs to mind is a Snapdragon 8xx as performance is of course, vital. The camera also needs to work although the resolution is not critical. NFC, Fingerprint sensor, SD card slot, GPS with Galileo, Wireless charging and other niceities are highly desireable, but I might give some of them up to accomodate other things depending on how critical they are. Unfortunately not many flagships have 5.4" screens or less, so the metal slider will be modified to accomodate this.
I'll choose a nice, big battery and place it in the bottom, right below the keyboard as the CoG needs to be really low to make the phone comfy to type on without letting it tip over.
Finally, a plastic or metal cover can be modelled to fit all this, and will probably be cheap to make. If the screen is bigger than the frame, i'll also have to make a second cover around the border, secured to the main slider frame.

The Q10's keyboard has arrived. The connector seen in the middle with a black ribbon has 24 contacts (plus 4 contacts in the extremities which are not counted, probably used for grounding). By comparison, the Priv connectors (male on top, female on motherboard) has 20 contacts despite the priv's trackpad function.
For those of you curious about the BB Passport, I've had a quick look inside and the connector is identical to the Q10's keyboard, although it works like the Priv. Rather confusing.
I'll be mapping the pinouts once the PCB and connectors arrive, unfortunately that's gonna be a long wait as they have to come to Germany from the U.S.

I finally have enough parts to start putting the encoder together. It is an SK5126 keyboard encoder from Sprintek. At just 7 x 7mm with 0.5mm pitch, it was not easy to solder on, but definitely doable with a bit of practice and common sense. The chip itself is not expensive (15usd a pop) but being in Germany, I had to pay through the nose for shipping and shameless customs. Sprintek's sales dept. have been very helpful though. Once I wired the PCB to an old USB cable (and a couple of resistors & capacitors), it was very much plug & play. I'm pleased.
Now it's time to wait again for the next bit of PCB and female connectors for the keyboards... It's at times like these that I regret the EU not having a trade agreement with the US.

The adapter PCB and Hirose female connector for the keyboard finally arrived today, but that's where the good news ends. Unfortunately the seller did not solder them together so I had to do it myself. That's when an obvious fact hit me in the face: the connector's melting point is lower than the solder paste's melting point. The first connector simply folded in a mess of molten plastic under the hot air. I tried the reballing method on the second (and last) connector, which simply pulled the individual legs of the connector apart.
Upon putting the PCB of the Encoder and the connector next to each other, it's clear that part of the success i had with soldering the encoder chip lied in having a footprint with nice long exposed contacts which allowed the surface tension of the solder to pull everything in place. That could not work on the much shorter footprint of the connector PCV. I've ordered some more connectors, it's gonna be a long wait, though I've yet to think of a proper way to solder without melting the connector.

So I've finally had a breakthrough. Some new PCBs arrived from Hong Kong and after a few molten connectors, I've managed to perfect the technique enough to not get any shorts. From there on, it was pretty straightforward. I mapped the keyboard's pinouts (red pcb) to the correct Row/Coloumn inputs of the encoder (green pcb) using the thin wires. It looks a bit messy until i figure out in which position the PCBs will sit inside the chassis.
I'm tempted to also try mapping the Priv's original keyboard, unfortunately, that's tricky, as there's no info about it online. It has a 20-pin connector (as opposed to 24 on the Q10) which also transmits touch input via a Synaptics microchip. I'll try going through it with a multimeter, if i can at least map out the button-matrix, then finding out the synaptics output will be a tad easier.
In the meantime, another issue is on my mind. I've been looking at teardowns of various snapdragon 7xx and 8xx phones and it's clear that some components (mostly the prox sensors) on most, if not all models, are soldered directly on the motherboard, which makes it difficult if I plan on putting the screen on the sliding portion of the chassis and the motherboard on the fixed portion of the chassis. I'm going to have to rethink the whole idea. If i put a lot of components on the sliding part of the chassis, then i risk making the phone top-heavy and thick. Unfortunately I do not have the technology to change this.
There is probably going to be a compromise somewhere, and I need to decide where to draw that line before I order more expensive parts.

very (!) interesting idea(-s) !!
I am incredibly curious to see the outcome, afraid I cannot really provide any help.
it is a real shame that blackberry didnt even provide some use-at-your-own-risk stuff to boot unsigned code...
maybe you want to try shopping for parts in china directly, I almost never pay customs (value below ~€20) for stuff.
cheers!

elchmartin said:
very (!) interesting idea(-s) !!
I am incredibly curious to see the outcome, afraid I cannot really provide any help.
it is a real shame that blackberry didnt even provide some use-at-your-own-risk stuff to boot unsigned code...
maybe you want to try shopping for parts in china directly, I almost never pay customs (value below ~€20) for stuff.
cheers!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks mate.
I already buy a lot of parts from China, however 1 thing I couldn't find online from there was an easy-to-use, low power encoder. I had to get it from Sprintek in California. Their products are really good and the price is also good. Unfortunately i had to pay a lot of money for customs (which of course is not Sprintek's fault). The encoder chips themselves cost me around $15 each, the programming software is free and the chip responds right away as soon as you plug it into the pc. They also have a good after-sale assistance.

Kyle M. said:
Thanks mate.
I already buy a lot of parts from China, however 1 thing I couldn't find online from there was an easy-to-use, low power encoder. I had to get it from Sprintek in California. Their products are really good and the price is also good. Unfortunately i had to pay a lot of money for customs (which of course is not Sprintek's fault). The encoder chips themselves cost me around $15 each, the programming software is free and the chip responds right away as soon as you plug it into the pc. They also have a good after-sale assistance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are living in Hamburg, Germany?
Maybe try looking for parts at pollin.de
They served rather rare items for me some times...

Project continued on https://hackaday.io/project/168387-physical-keyboard-for-any-android-phone

I can finally update with some good news. After ironing out all the issues (most of which concern the pesky Hirose connector which connects the keyboard to the PCB), I took the 2 boards off the metal frame and made myself a little box from PVC sheets which I then glued to an old Xiaomi phone cover. The reason I am testing it this way rather than just building the slider I wanted to build is to prevent having to mod the Xiaomi phone while testing (I've grown quite attached to this phone despite having bought it cheap).
I have also put a small switch on the side which directly cuts off the power to the chip (this way it saves power and seems to work pretty fine).