You know a piece of tech is going to be fun to take apart when it makes you go buy a new set of bits just to be able to open it
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Erin 💽✨replied to Graham Sutherland / Polynomial last edited by
@gsuberland @foone Hmm, I see a Quectel modem (presumably ARM), an ESP32, and one of the headers is labeled “NRF DBG” which would imply there’s a Nordic chip in there somewhere although I don’t see that
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And on the backside we've got a ST STM32L4S5VI. That's an Arm Cortex-M4 running at 120mhz. This variant has 2 megabytes of onboard flash memory and 640 kilobytes of ram (WHICH SHOULD BE ENOUGH FOR ANYBODY)
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The other PCB is the front panel. It's got an LCD on it (monochrome, I think?) and an antenna for NFC.
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@gsuberland @foone Ah I see there’s an STM32 right next to the top one and a QFN which I can’t read but is plausibly an nRF51/52 next to the other.
This thing has too many MCUs.
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The flip side has a single chip on it: An NXP PN7150L That's an NFC controller (and an ARM Cortex-M0)
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Plugging the battery back in, it powers on, but says it's at 0% battery.
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It then sits on this screen permanently, saying Please Wait and an error code: 0x24007.
This is probably it trying to dial home, but since I pulled the SIM card it can't do that.
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@erincandescent @gsuberland @foone and I thought I was bad with four STM32s and an FPGA in a complex 1U rack mount gizmo with three different boards.
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The battery is a 3235mAh 18650 with a 5 wire plug on it.
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I think the display has a backlight, and that thing in the bottom-left looks like an ambient light sensor, but without being able to boot the thing further I can't get it to turn on the backlight.
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This did have a sim card in it when I got it. it's still active.
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@azonenberg @gsuberland @foone every rental scooter board seems to be like this. The sheer lack of cost optimisation insults me.
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And it's got a set of connectors on the back. Presumably whatever scooter this plugged into had some of these, but I don't really know why it needs SO many.
Maybe variants for different types of scooters? At the very least, I think it's hooking into a can bus and power (so it can recharge the battery, since there's no other input)
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Graham Sutherland / Polynomialreplied to Erin 💽✨ last edited by
@erincandescent @foone @azonenberg the design kinda screams rush to market
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@erincandescent @gsuberland @foone Yeah I'm building specialty T&M gear so with a $1K+ ten layer board and a big Xilinx I really don't care about cost optimizing the micros.
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@foone is this one of those funky hybrid lcd/e-paper/"SHARP" displays? or am i just going mad?
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Erin 💽✨replied to Graham Sutherland / Polynomial last edited by
@gsuberland @foone @azonenberg but then they seem to stick around for a while
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@foone it’s be cool to have a virtual cell provider that acts like mitmproxy - so u can pop a special sim into a device and then head to your portal and intercept the network
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@magni yeah I was just thinking about that
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@doskel no, I think it's just a monochrome LCD with a lot of contrast. It doesn't seem to be epaper