New pics from my decapping project

In the first two pics you can see the damage been made by the drill i used. Only a fraction has been revealed with the drill and the rest was made with nitric acid.

Both of the mcu's were damaged because i used a small tweezer to clean up the excess debris without the ultrasonic cleaner.

Lesson learned: No more tools inside until the whole wafer is exposed. I have to be careful with the drill too.

VX-8R docs

Seems the ham community missed the VX8 series radios.
Most of the sites are not updated regarding the user or service manual or the device. Lack of info around the handheld is 90%.
Wtf happened with this one? In the older days people people were building projects around handhelds or torn it apart to mod it etc.
Maybe Yaesu has been left behind a bit. If i could design a handheld i would make sure to have a USB interface for a PC, maybe pack as many features i can inside,  remember times have changed, people use computers for everything and the market tends to work near computers.
One of the problems i see is that they do not use new technology very efficient by using old parts or complicated designs, yes they are reliable as hell but radios lack of some features that in the newer days are mandatory.
Someone might say "if you pack too many features inside then the handheld won't be reliable or will have crappy performance"
Not true, newer designs can use far more reliable parts and circuits. Newer microcontrollers (like the PIC32 etc) can offer more but the manufacturers still choose small ARM architecture MCU's.
Then there is the problem of copyright and FCC etc, but anyway if someone wants to copy or mod  a design he will do it no matter what, remember the nokia BB5 series? They "used" to be the most secure platform and now it's an every day unlock.

MCU decapping for live analysis

Hey!

I was decapping some PIC MCU's lately (PIC12F629, 18F4550, 18FC452, 16F876A, 16F84 etc) for live analysis. Mainly for training my hands on and some security bits erase.

I got the ideas from Sergei Skorobogatov's page and Bunny's blog the first one is one of the best sites i've ever seen on MCU security.

So i started.

One thing  was annoying was the YELLOW light from the stereoscope lightbulb, so i thought i change the bulbs with newer technology LED ones.

I purchased from ebay for about 2$ two festoon 36mm led lamps and plugged them in.

Surprise suprise!! The stereoscope has only a transformer without any other circuits and the led was only flickering at 50Hz. Damn!

I made a quick perforated board power supply with filtering using the 78S12 regulator and presto.

Note: Images show only the under side of the scope (which i do not use). There is also a LED lamp above. You can see part of the board with the regulator and heatsink (when you have the led's on it's barely some degrees over room temp).

I like it, now i can proceed!

I'm using a drill to create the first pit and to eat away most of the black rosin from the chip and then i use 70% Nitric Acid to burn through it. Nitric acid works best when heated around 70% and i found out that my pcb preheater works fine for this.

Stay tuned for more.

DS1307 Real time clock

I was ordering samples the other day because i need some parts fow a new project which has a PIC18F87J60 MCU with ethernet.

So i was browsing to find a nice clock on maxim-ic.com Maxim has some new RTCC with internal oscillator which minimises part count on the pcb but the cost is like 7,50$ each, that raises production costs. I could also use DS1307 which is a standard RTC with I2C, the cost is about 2,90$ each.

While i was browsing microchip i saw the MCP79410 which is by far better than the DS1307.

It's cheaper, about a third of the DS (0,80 or 0,90$) and it also is a direct replacement. Pin compatible, same start and stop conditions and even the memory map is the same PLUS some more features like alarm clocks and timestamps.

I ordered 3 and now designing a 100 x 160 mm dev board to integrate them on my system. Seems like a better and cheaper way for production purposes.

MSP430 LaunchPad

Texas Instruments released a very nice and smooth development system on the price of 4.30$ or 3.08 euros.

You can find details here http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/msp-exp430g2.html#description . Just go ahead and buy it. I allready bought one just to explore it.

iPhone 4 Vs HTC Evo

http://www.break.com/index/iphone-4-vs-htc-evo.html

Yaesu VX-8 LED mod

Many people ask me about the size of the led's i've used.

The display needs 3 LED's 1206 size mounted on an angle.

The keyboard needs 10 pieces of 0603 LED's size.

I am going to make a video on removing and re soldering a led with a simple soldering iron for those of you asking me by mail.

Would be great if you could spend some time and click on some ads, since i'm out of cash it would help a lot for my researches on the yaesu and other stuff. So far i've have had a few clicks tho lol.

In the mean time check the video of the VX-8 showing the color of the display and keyboard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYBhpiIrMC8