I STRONGLY SUPPORT ka6sox's need to tear a nook color down for analysis to the remove chips from the board level (this is called "salting" a board... I have no idea why, perhaps because like putting salt on a slug, it's dead when you're done.)
Here are some things we need hardware teardown to identify....
- Bluetooth is enabled or disabled by putting +V on a pin on the UNDERSIDE of the wl1230 chip. No way to tell if BT is enabled without a teardown.
- USB chip on the board is capable of USB master and USB otg mode, however the correct strapping of the voltage regulators supporting that chip can not be identified from above.
- The extra pins on the USB connector the NC uses dissappear into the inside of the board, there is no way to ensure that they are MERELY power connectors.
- FM Radio is enabled with +v on a pin just as the BT is. Again requiring a teardown.
- There may be jtag pads available near the CPU, this would allow devs to have serial access to the CPU during boot to develop custom kernels, at the present time, there is NO CONSOLE during boot. This would help. Again, no way to identify them without teardown.
- it is possible that an fm antenna can be easily attached to a test pad. But we won't know until we know if the fm output is DIRECTED to a test pad.
- there's more, but that alone justifies ripping a nook color to bits.
Eugenekay has agreed to buy a board for this purpose if the community agrees it's a good use of funds, and ka6sox is uniquly qualified to do it, since he's done it before...
