We labelled that mofo. Er, mobo.
February 24, 2010
When a photo of the latest board revision was posted a few days back, a handful of commenters pondered the possibility of a labelled version. The GP32X trainspotters had actually done this before, on a much older revision. So a new request went out on the forums, and the community got busy once again. And how! Click the image above and you won’t just get a high resolution version, you’ll get a space-age interactive experience with enough hotlinked reading material to sink a brick shiphouse. Thanks go out to all contributors, with special honours to wea0 for digging up the bulk of the part numbers, urjaman for putting together the clicky version, and LeChuck87 for re-hosting it.
Please note that this is 100% unofficial. It has not been endorsed or confirmed correct by OP Ltd. If you’re planning on building your own Pandora from this diagram, you’ll have to figure out what’s on the other seven PCB layers. Ha.
I think it is cool and all, but I think it is a bit too detailed, it would be easy for some chinese company to rip off this much information to make a clone
I was hesitant at first, but it’s been up in the forums for a few days and I know at least Craig has seen it. The information only comes from reading the text on the parts, then Googling, so I don’t think we’re revealing too much. Remember it’s an 8 layer PCB. The magic is in MWeston’s design, not the off-the-shelf parts.
Okay, that many layers would make it quite hard to mimic…
8 layers is trivial to copy. There are companies whose sole purpose is to dissect things like this layer by layer. Reverse engineering has existed for a long long time.
Though I doubt anyone will copy it anytime soon for such a small market.
Trivial maybe if you have the part but thats irrelevant to the decision of weather to post the picture. This pic is actually less helpful than the original because in the original one you could read the part numbers off the chips.
that is one sexy pcb…
Thanks a lot for your efforts, very interesting…
Why are you worried about people stealing the design? I thought it was supposed to be the *Open* Pandora?
If I remember correctly they didn’t go down the route of having a Chinese company design and build the device because they kept changing things that made it worse. Presumably any Chinese ripoff would have similar changes that wouldn’t live up to the original…
pandora is made in china.
not all parts of the pandora are made in china
only the case, PCB work was not done there
Wow, amazing information overload. Very interesting to read. Thanks a bunch to everyone involved.
I wouldn’t worry too much about ripoffs, if someone copied the PCB 1:1 they would be forced to use the OMAP4 as a main processor, and I remember it being said on the forums that Texas Instruments only sells the chip to select customers.
Dana-nana-nana-nana-nana-nana-na, BatConn!
*lol*. Go write “battery connector” on it in any decent font size yourself
But “Dana-nana-nana-nana-nana-nana-na, Battery Connector!” wouldn’t fit the music, or amuse me so much
Can we get a report on the TPS?
I didn’t get a memo about them.
Nice to see what will be inside the case I’ll dare not open.
“Omap”. “NAND” & RAM” can’t be in one chip, since the RAM and NAND have been changed from 128mb to 256mb and 256mb to 512mb in the middle of the project, keeping the Omap from the beginning, right?
They’re separate parts, but the NAND & RAM are mounted on top of the OMAP (so we can’t actually see the OMAP at all).
Ok, didn’t know that. Thx Gruso!
I hesitated a bit on marking that chip as “OMAP”, but then people would have said “Where’s the OMAP?”, so I just labelled it “as if” they were combined…
Ну и как Вам церемония закрытия игр? По моему, ещё хуже чем открытие.
Вот у китайцев 2 года назад было всё сделано очень очень здорово! Наверное потому, что у китайцев культура гораздо старше и богаче, чем у североамериканцев.. или дело не в этом?