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Handhelds Hardware

Palm M100 "Kaizo" Hack: 8 Megs On the Cheap 99

Posted by timothy from the small-hands dept.
For those who must, absolutely and without fail, take apart anything electronic which crosses the threshold of their homes, Toolsmith writes, "Here's an interesting site explaining how to upgrade your Palm m100 to 8MB of memory. "Kaizo" is Japanese for "Upgrade". They show pictures of an m100 being upgraded from 2MB to 8MB. Here's the link. Has anyone tried this one yet?"
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Palm M100 "Kaizo" Hack: 8 Megs On the Cheap More

Palm M100 "Kaizo" Hack: 8 Megs On the Cheap

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  • Heh (Score:4)

    by vsync64 ( 155958 ) <vsync@quadium.net> on Wednesday August 30, 2000 @10:32PM (#814631) Homepage
    "Must take apart anything electronic"... That's so true. I just bought a DVD player, and for some reason a disk got stuck in the tray. Now, the place I bought it is just a few blocks from my apartment, so I could easily have taken it back for service, but instead I just whipped out a screwdriver and started opening it up.

    I don't know if opening a DVD player will void the warranty, but I honestly didn't care that much. And it wasn't so much the disk or the player that I was concerned about; I was just suddenly filled with excitement that I had an excuse to see the inside of my new toy. It was at this point that I realized Wow, I bet most people wouldn't be doing this.

    Just thought I'd share... =)

  • [OT, Redundant, Unoriginal, yadda yadda yadda] (Score:5)

    by Pont ( 33956 ) on Wednesday August 30, 2000 @10:35PM (#814632)
    For only USD 19.99, I can tell YOU how to turn any model of Palm Pilot into a paperweight.

  • Has anyone got a steady hand? (Score:5)

    by mariab ( 198250 ) on Wednesday August 30, 2000 @10:36PM (#814633)
    This looked fascinating to me until I realised that you need to rework surface mounted components!

    I don't know how many people who read /. have tried this, but I have a few years ago. It is possibly one of the most incredibly difficult things you can attempt! I could move that little resistor they have marked, but to succesfully remove an entire DRAM chip and resolder a new one would require some extraordinary skill!

    Even when I was at my most practised and my hands seemed rock steady to me I would NEVER have attempted this!

    even now i could remove the chip, but to put in place a new one would be unthinkable

    Please no-one try this unless you are completely sure you can pull it off, I have visions of hundreds of wrecked palms from people try to do this.

    If you DO want to try it still .. good luck :)
    but don't come crying if your Palm gets amnesia ;)

  • Now if only it was easy to do this to Palm Vs...

    grumble grumble glued shut grumble grumble

    Anyone know how? My Workpad c3 [ibm rebranded palm V] is almost full.

    tree, n: lump of wood with green things
  • > I was just suddenly filled with excitement that I had an excuse to see the inside
    > of my new toy. It was at this point that I realized Wow, I bet most people
    > wouldn't be doing this.

    hang on, you need an excuse? :)

    I never needed an excuse...

    though I did occasionally need a quick hand to put all the screws back in before my parents got back, but that was when i was much younger.

    I guess niether of us are "most people" :)

  • Who's got 8mb worth of addresses and phone numbers to store?

  • Wrong. (Score:5)

    by BJH ( 11355 ) on Wednesday August 30, 2000 @10:49PM (#814637)

    Kaizo doesn't mean "upgrade"; it means "alteration" or "modification".

    BTW, if you go here [fureai.or.jp] you can read the original Japanese (and if you can't read Japanese, you can look at the pictures of the place where they did the modification - a little bar in Akihabara). The hack is more impressive when you realize they did it while getting drunk ;)

  • There are special irons we used to work SMT parts, but it was more for discrete capacitors and resistors and such, don't know what is recommended for working the multipin devices like the SDRAM in this case.

    Beautiful hack though!
  • It's not too difficult if you have the right (i.e. expensive :) tools... I took a class on surface mount soldering at the local community college (for no particular reason), and to remove surface mount chips, we used a large rectangular iron tip that would heat all the pins at once. Let it heat for a while so all the solder melts, and give it a little twist, and it comes right off.

    For those of us with lesser means, if you don't care about saving the original chip, you could probably use some small diagonal cutters to clip all the pins, then desolder the pins individually. If you do want to try to keep the original chip, use desoldering wick on the pins and gently lift them up. (Then you'll have to try to bend 'em all back in line if you want to use the chip elsewhere... if I were doing this, I wouldn't worry about keeping the old chip... that's way too much work :)

    As for the resoldering part, that's actually not that hard... take a surface mount soldering class to find out how it's done ;)

  • Well, my recipe tells you how to turn any of your friends' Palm Pilots into your Palm Pilots!

    1. Wait until they are not looking
    2. Snatch the Palm from them
    3. Run
    4. Seek new friends
    5. Rinse, Repeat

    Now that you have read this, you will have to pay me USD 10,90. Or not.


    --
    this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.

  • With 8MB you can hold like 2 3minute MP3s or a whole movie trailer on your palm!

    Oh wait, the PALM can't play those back yet...

    Handspring [handspring.com] anyone?

  • Ti-graphing calculaor (Score:3)

    by Duke of Org ( 147376 ) on Wednesday August 30, 2000 @10:59PM (#814642)
    Is it possible to do this same type of hack to a TI-83+ due to the fact they use the same type of proc (Dragonball Z80)?

    You all don't know how bad it sucks to have only 28k (iirc) to store games on. I can only get about 2-3 games on their at max. Some games even take up the whole amount (like the doom port which has only 4 screens, front, left, right, front with baddie shooting.)
  • I disagree with you here, I have replaced surface mount chips on a couple of things.....and you don't have to be *that* steady, just meticulous. Send me one and ill show ya.
  • Hey man, that's a heckova lot better than the people who are so afraid of their electronics they take it back to the shop to get new batteries put in! (Don't laugh, I bet you know somebody like that... I do... I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong... it's not me... dangit.)
  • Please no-one try this unless you are completely sure you can pull it off, I have visions of hundreds of wrecked palms from people try to do this.

    And if the OC craze is anything to go by, they'll go around whining about it.

    Don't get me wrong; hardware hacking is fun, and clueful hardware hackers can do way cool stuff, but I get sick of people complaining that a product line is unreliable (because they keep OCing components until they fail), or who turn up on mailing lists complaining about hardware bugs (and then let slip that they're running heavily - 1.5-2x normal - OCed components, and whine that OCing can't be the problem). Too many people, IMO, are delving into stuff they don't really understand, and then bleating when they wind up with broken stuff.


    --
    My name is Sue,
    How do you do?
    Now you gonna die!
  • The key problem is most likely not only the mechanical one of soldering in the new chip but also that you have to be ultra careful not to zap the chips by electrostatic charges. So you need antistatic wrist straps and a place to attach them.

    I seriously doubt they did it in the bar in Akihabara which they mention on their Japanese page. This area of Tokyo is one of the most lively places you can imagine (only Shibuya or one of the major subways stations are similar).

    Besides that, you really need a very steady hand to solder pins that have a 1.27mm (i.e. 1/20") grid, hence roughly 0.5mm distance between the pins.

    But with the right tools it's ok. I once had to build a pre-series demo model using SMD chips and it worked fine (but took forever).

  • Well, I actually taught myself how to do this :)

    oh, and clipping all the pins IS a cheating method, but hey, it is how i would have done it, then your can remove the old solder and remains of legs at you leisure.

    And yes, whilst soldering a new chip in is technically quite simple (hint: stick the chip down to hold it in place, but don't use massively strong glue in case you want to reposition it :). that is a fantastically huge number of pins and I would never be able to keep my hand steady enough to do it without making a mess of the whole thing :(

    all through this, you have to make sure you only apply as much heat as you need, because too much heat will make all the tracks on the board curl and peel off. I watched this happen once, it was a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.... AND the damn solder still didn't melt

    ok, time to stop waffling and go back to working :)

  • Yeah. Then there's the people who post to linux-kernel saying things like, "I've been getting these strange oopses - it looks like something's buggy in the memory management", and go on to give a system report that begins "CPU: Dual 300MHz Celerons @ 450MHz..."


  • you need to update your .sig:
    Google results 1-10 of about 82,300,000 for b. Search took 0.11 seconds
  • Why do you "seriously doubt" that they did it in Akihabara? It even has photos of the place where they did it. And Akihabara is nowhere as busy as Shibuya, Shinjuku or any of the major business areas in Tokyo. Added to that is the fact that they did it in the evening (after 7:30), when Akihabara is a lot quieter than it is during the day.

    They even thank the owner of the bar for letting them use electricity and bring a soldering iron into the bar ;)


  • I get told that roughly once every five posts I make, but I think a search time of less than a twentieth of a second is cooler than adding an extra 20 million sites ;)

  • Sorry for the self-response, but it would seem that Google caches searches, because on the third or fourth try, it went from 0.11 seconds down to this:

    Google results 1-10 of about 82,300,000 for b. Search took 0.05 seconds.

    Maybe I will update my sig - but I'll leave it for later so this thread doesn't become any more pointless than it already is ;)


  • I got a TI-99+ and you just reminded me. I'm gonna get it out the attik and have a play.

    Its got a speech synth, a cartridge port, and the best space invader game I ever played, Parsec

    I seem to have not so much drifted off topic, more pole vaulted, sorry.




    ==============================
  • now the whole f*&^$%#@g thing makes more sense. having fell in love with computing and IT, i haven't had one stirring moment of desire to tear shit apart(much less re-engineer it). i hope they had a hang-over the size of manhattan, and vow never to a)drink again, or b)hide the soldering iron when they do. "preflight before marriage"- gutenburgh
  • Ok, sorry, you're probably right. Reading Japanese really helps ;).

  • C'mon, fess up. (Score:3)

    by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Wednesday August 30, 2000 @11:52PM (#814656) Journal
    That was an adult DVD wasn't it, and it would be too embarressing to take that to the repair shop or your parents were due back in 30 minutes!

    Naturally, nothing like that has ever happened to me. Ever. No matter what anyone else says.
  • DUDE, you should! it's called a laptop. l-a-p-t-o-p. try one out. your friend-dp
  • "Must take apart anything electronic..."

    Reminds me of when I was young and got my first HiFi system. I was so happy and the first thing I did was take it to pieces to see how it worked. I broke it down until I had taken all the drive belts off the cassette player and and all the cogs off the spindles.

    My parents were horrified that I had trashed my birthday present within a few hours. I guess though some people have a natural inclination to find out how things work. Even at the risk of breaking something you love. Hey, this is how we all manage to be Linux hackers. We want to know how things work inside. We can never settle for the closed world of Windows(tm).
  • I wasn't a part of this particular hack, but I am buddies with the guys who did this. The original chip (2Meg) is junk - any Palm nowadays comes with at least the same capacity - so we just go ahead and clip all the legs.
  • Dude, I'm 14, I have 400$ in my name, find me a laptop for that much, will ya?
  • I saw someone did the conversion in a computer mall in Hong Kong for around US $50. You pay the money and the guy will crack open your PalmV, pull the memory and resolder a new chip right in front of you in less than 15 minutes. It's really amazing. I think maybe these guys just have very steady hands. You can see more infomation about Palm upgrade here [interlog.com] which is linked to the Singapore Palm User's Group Linked Web Pages [spug.org].
  • If you want a laptop on the cheap, look for a used 486/386. More power than that calculator, and still able to play crappy games.

    This is how I got a laptop in high school. I had a seriously underpowered machine, but hey, it did the trick and cost less than $400.

    Be warned that you will not get your money back on it though.
  • Hack? The Palm IIIx is expandable ! Just buy an expansion module and plug it in. The hack about the M100 is cool because that model is _not_ expandable, ie it is supposed to remain w/ 2MB
  • I removed the leg of surface mount DRAM by cutting it with the cutter. The point is to dab a blade levelly so as not to damage the pattern. I think that it is difficult to resoldering without special resoldering tool.

  • So far, so good, so what? (Score:3)

    by broody ( 171983 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @01:19AM (#814665)
    So what, palm hacking is old news.

    This site [interlog.com]is for hacking the IIIe/IIIx if anyone gives a fuck.

  • This link [mikew.org] will take you to a Handspring Visor page. It's more exploratory surgery than an upgrade, but it's fun for those of us who want to see the Visor's innards
  • You do it because you can.
    Need a better reason?
  • From the bottom of the translated article:-

    "KAIZO"(Japanese) is a very standard word which means "MODIFICATION","REMODELLING","UPGRADE".

    From the film The Usual Suspects:-

    Whaddaafa?

    I'm not flaming, just wondered what your angle is.

  • I don't know if opening a DVD player will void the warranty, It's obvious that by opening your DVD player, you were clearly attempting to circumvent CSS at the hardware level, which must violate some section or other of the DMCA -- after all, that's what we paid Congress for. You'll be hearing from our crack legal team, but in the meantime, we demand that you supply us with your address, phone number, and samples of several bodily fluids.

    Respectfully,
    The MPAA
    Protecting Your Right To Watch What We Tell You To. And How to Do So. And When, Dammit!


  • "If it is possible to have removed beautifully"

    I once bought a hibachi with instructions in Japanese and English. The top of the instructions had a line that said "The Wonderful More Than You Can Believe It"

  • I am SANAI who did this "KAIZO". We did truly this "KAIZO" in small Okinawa Restaurant at Akihabara. This season in Japan, the humidity is high, there is not an obctrostatic problem. I didn't use the list strap to miss static electricity.
  • This is a the geeks way of modify thier car adding a great sound sysytem and such. I am always impressed when people to these updrades to thier own machines. It says I do not need the company to make any changes I can do it my damn self
  • list strap instead of wrist strap? I'm not making fun of you, but I doubt you are who you say you are. Japanese language speakers typically use R instead of L, not L instead of R. Like my favorite sushi bar: robster special!
  • Hi sillysally, That's Light! We Japanese mistake R instead of L. but this case, it is the preblem of translate Software. Please visit this site. Maybe you can find many English mistakes. http://homepage1.nifty.com/jl1bmw/1016nightrider/p nr_e.htm

  • 8mb upgrade, easy as pie. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31, 2000 @02:12AM (#814675)
    i did it, and it aint that hard. for more info go to : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tew/m100hack/ alot easier, and better english!

  • Palm OS will only address 12MB (Score:3)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @02:18AM (#814676) Homepage Journal
    That's about it. The OS is limited in the amount of RAM it can address so 12MB is the max including ROM. I suppose you could build a 4MB ROM, flash it and add an 8MB RAM for a total of 12MB but that sounds like engineering for the sake of engineering.

    Also for those of you who aren't real familiar with the Palm be aware that more storage = less battery.
  • You'll give them ideas.
  • Wonder if anyone has done a similar upgrade on a Palm VII? Now that'd be useful!

  • 'Nuff said.

    BTW, I had a roommate who would watch an international channel at school just so he would watch DragonballZ...in Japanese.

    Trouble was, he didn't speak or understand Japanese.

    Fucking lamer.

  • Re:What's the Point? MP3! DivX! (Score:3)

    by deusx ( 8442 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @02:27AM (#814680) Homepage
    Or, umm, you could put some handy books on it. For instance, I have the entire Perl CD Bookshelf on mine under iSilo, so I see the HTML version, pictures & all.

    Screw movies & mp3's. I want something useful in my pocket. Movies, I'll rent or buy for my DVD player. Music, I'll buy a dedicated mp3 player. That's not what my PDA is for.

  • Re:Has anyone got a steady hand? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well, there's a knack to it, and you need the right tools (Good Iron, solder wick, heatgun, good eyes ) and lots and lots of practice but replacing surface mount IC's ain't that hard.
    When we (as in the development section of my company) were smaller we used to do it fairly routinely for prototypes and I've done 208 pin QFP fit/replacements by hand with a pretty good (four out of five) degree of success first time round. Some of our full time line techs get way better success rates than that. They tend to heat the component with a heatgun lift the thing out whole (note: leave the pads on the PCB ;) then clean up the area with wick, put down the new device, anchor the corner points, drown the thing in flux and then just run across the device pins with the iron and solder, finally clean up any pin shorts with wick and job done. (It's pretty impressive to watch this happen at first)

    OTOH I'd agree that the average /. reader should never try any of this on anything as expensive/neat as a palm pilot...Well not your own anyways... ;>

    (Now hand replacing BGA's, thats hard ...)

  • Why dont you shut the fuck up you karma whore

  • Interesting, settings wiped out of course... (Score:3)

    by Fross ( 83754 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @02:39AM (#814683)
    a point to note if you want to try this, or anything else, is that all your settings on your palm will get wiped out - you can see this by comparing the "before" and "after" pictures on the kaizo site - the addressbook has dropped from 2k to 1k, presumably an empty minimum size.

    just bear in mind that not *everything* gets backed up in a hotsync. but apart from that, happy hacking!

    fross
  • www.onsale.com

    you can pick up p133's with 16 meg ram, 1 gig hd's, and a 12.1" tft screen for about 300 bucks usually.. get some ram off ebay for cheap. for 400 bucks, you might even find a p166mmx, with 32 meg.
    i've got two of the p133's inbound, for 250each, if NEI ever gets off their ass and figures out how to charge my credit card. they claim the bank rejected the charges. Which is interesting, cause there's far more clear on the limit, than what they're trying to charge.
    Heh, just checked your age. You might have to borrow a credit card =)
  • When will all these upgrading stop? I've seen Gameboy carts upgraded, PDAs upgraded, and even proprietary systems have been hacked up for other uses...

    God I love electronics.

  • and toothless hilljacks such as yourself typically make a whistling sound when pronouncing words like "special" -theherd

  • Re:Palm OS will only address 12MB (Score:3)

    by killbill ( 10058 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @03:08AM (#814687) Homepage
    Actually, while this is true, the TRG Pro includes an "autoCF" tool that will dynamically (and for the most part invisibly) swap applications and databases in and out of the memory in its compact flash slot.

    That means that my 8 meg TRG Pro has about 20 megs of applications and data loaded, and still has 4 megs free :)

    You are right as well about increased battery usage, but we should keep it in perspective... Even with some 26 Megabytes in my TRG Pro, I still get over a week at a time usage of rechargable alkalines (at about 65% discharge).

    Bill
  • I found a couple of people offering to do this hack for you for $79 or so. They have been doing this thing on the Palm V's for some time now, and the M100 is a far easier mod.

    But I can't find an online source for the chips. Anybody scare up a wholesaler that has these in stock and is willing to deal in small volumes?

    I did a very similiar hack to turn my original Pilot 5000 (512k) into a professional (1MB... woo hoo!). Great fun. Make sure you have a grounded soldering iron, otherwise you could very easily blow the gates internal to the chip.

    Bill
  • (Score -1, Shit for brains)
  • Check this site out: Engrish.com [engrish.com]

    It shows how the Japanese change the English language into something simply hillarious and paste it on all their products.
  • I haven't done the palm upgrade (I don't have a palm pilot), but I did replace the 32k sram in my hp48g with 128k sram.

    The sram was surface mount... I just used solder braid to get it off the board.

    Soldering on the other chip was challenging, and even more so as I have shaky hands. I clipped tiny segments of solder off of the solder spool using an exacto blade... the pieces were maybe 0.5 mm to 1 mm long. The solder had a rosin core so the pieces were like donuts. I then stuck the pieces onto the leads of the sram and placed the sram on the solder pads on the board.

    With the small amount of solder in place, I didn't have to be tremendously steady with the soldering iron. I did manage to bridge a couple pins, but the exacto blade separated these as well.

    I suppose you could use solder paste, but I've personally never had much luck with the stuff.

    I wasn't too familiar with electro-static discharge at the time, so I didn't use a wrist strap. But this was in missouri, and if you have something like 40-50% humidity static usually isn't a problem.

    years later I am still using the same calculator.

    so anyway, surface mount isn't always that hard to manually work with.

    --cheese
  • it was a 30 watt iron, which is pretty excessive for the job... a 15 watt would probably be safer.
  • I hope you're joking (if not, Z80s are still pretty widely used (not in home computers though))

    Mikael Jacobson
  • It's practically the same. The resistors you move are just in different places. The real hard part it taking apart your palm V. Read no further if you get scared. really. most palm V owners would not want there palms to go through this.. You have to melt the glue that holds it together with a Hair Dryer or something similar. It has to get really really hot before it will come appart. Like burning your fingers hot. But it works, I can attest to that. anyone have the url to the old palm V hack page?
  • Well, I opened my reciever (Pioneer VSX-305) and silk screened onto one of the circuit boards is a woman's face and the word "YUKI" printed under it. Makes you wonder if the designer had a thing for this Yuki woman and never told anyone, just putting her face on the board...
  • I wouldn't know (I'm a HP guy, and at the price I paid, I'm almost afraid to think about a soldering iron in the same room as I keep it). Anyway, just a minor nit here: the DragonBall is a MC680x0 workalike, not a Z80. The 68K, of course, is everyone's favourite old 16/32 bit CPU, while the Z80 is a hardcore 8-bitter. OK? Thanks.
  • Hey, got a pic of that? Sounds cool; I'd like to see it.
  • On the port from Moto dragonball to the strongARM, all memory limitations are gone.
    also, TRG, handspring, and sony (memory stick) have ways around these limitations.


    A host is a host from coast to coast
    but no one uses a host that's close
  • It ain't are fault, it's those dang blunderbusses they make us use to hunt varmints. The kick back from those guns is enough to make anybodys teeth loose. You have to admire a steady hand though, whether aiming a gun or soldering a chip.
  • Yeah, I'll have a digicam pic of it by late this afternoon on the graphics part of my site...

  • I can't believe that got a +5 informative... and I can't believe I just complained about moderation... I guess there's a first for everything!

    This looked fascinating to me until I realised that you need to rework surface mounted components!

    Anything you want to hack these days you will do so by reworking SMT. It's a fact of life until we get to molecular circuitry, at which point I think the game will be over for most people. Hell I think with the BGA stuff now it pretty much is over for the hobbiest.

    It is possibly one of the most incredibly difficult things you can attempt! I could move that little resistor they have marked, but to succesfully remove an entire DRAM chip and resolder a new one would require some extraordinary skill!

    Actually reworking SMT is not all that hard. I used to assemble PCMCIA video cards (204 pin TQFP, some SOJ, a handful of 1206 resistors and capacitors, etc.) with nothing more than a pair of tweezers and a fine pitch soldering iron.

    Rework is slightly more difficult but the simple truth is that if you're going to throw away an IC, the best way to get it off the board is to take a razor blade and cut the pins off flush with the case and then remove the pins from the board. Much cleaner, and much less chance of damaging the board itself. If you've got to save the chip things get more difficult in a hurry but that's another story.

    even now i could remove the chip, but to put in place a new one would be unthinkable

    Placing a TQFP or other fine-pitch component is a piece of cake. You need that fine point iron, some solder flux and solder:

    • make sure the pads are clean (i.e. flat)
    • take your flux pen and put a fair amount of flux on the pads (just wipe it across a whole row at a time)
    • place the chip down and carefully line it up
    • tack down one corner of the chip. There should be enough solder to short 3-4 leads together
    • re-align the device (it should only need submillimeter realignment) and tack down the other corner
    • use the flux pen and wipe it across all the pins, a whole row at a time
    • Now this is the tricky part... you literally drag the soldering iron across one side of the chip.
    If you had enough of a solder blob and the iron angle is right and you've got enough flux, you will leave a perfect amount of solder on each pin and the solder job will be indistinguishable from a professionally mounted device. The speed at which you drag it is enough to heat up the pad and the pin sufficiently and the capilliary action of the solder "sucks" it under the pin and bonds it to the pad. I destroyed a few devices (bent the pins, you can never get them looking right again) with the wrong angle but once I got the hang of it down, I could do a 204 pin PQFP in about 6 minutes. I did up 150 prototypes that summer and not one had a failure in the solder work.

    This kind of stuff can be done, and quite easily... you just need to keep your most valuable resource (patience!) handy and keep your excitement in check.

  • Is it possible to do this same type of hack to a TI-83+ due to the fact they use the same type of proc (Dragonball Z80)?
    TI-8x uses a Zilog Z80 processor, no relation to the Motorola Dragonball processors used in Palms.

  • it was a 30 watt iron, which is pretty excessive for the job... a 15 watt would probably be safer.

    That's a common misconception that heat kills.

    In reality, too little heat is actually far more damging to the board. You end up causing the pads to lift up from the epoxy board by keeping the iron in there too long.

    Yes too much heat is damaging, but I've seen far more boards killed by people and their "cold" irons. Use a hot iron, get in, and get out.

  • Re:What's the Point? MP3! DivX! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I used to sometimes carry around small MS-DOS executables on my HP48-Sx calculator. It had kermit, after all. Things like that marvel of utilites: Dirmagic, which was like 8K bytes.

    They didn't run on the calculator, but you could push them out the serial port to whatever computer you wanted.
  • Are any of you as obsessive as I am about getting each and every screw back in?

    Yeah, but I lose half of them half the time, and then spend a while frantically obsessing where they might have gone and gently shaking the unit to make sure there aren't any screws stuck inside... I need to buy one of those toolkits with the screw holder.

  • except for the 89 which uses the dragonball
  • Ummm, ever hear of Mapopolis [mapopolis.com]?

    --CP
  • Can we expect a world epoxy shortage as Palm splatters it all over the pc board to prevent people from, um, reengineering their Palms?

    Oh, that's right, this isn't Netpliance. Sorry. Carry on....

  • In order to realize the possibilities of this, stop thinking of the Palm as an organizer. That's what it gets marketed as. Now start thinking of it in different terms, for example...a small terminal you can put anywhere in your house. Check email, sequence MP3s, view current news, weather, etc. It is essentially a small computer waiting to be put to good use.

    They work well as dumbterms too. With extra space in this thing, the next step could be a use for something like monitoring and recording performance data. I've been thinking about using the serial port to take readings and record flight data with my Palm on a model airplane.

    The price for the old palms is only $150 now. Where else can you get a copmuter with a display for that much?
  • See http://horizon.pair.com/e2
  • It's not just the electronics, it's just about anything that can be taken apart!

    I think I started taking apart all of my X-mas toys when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I was 8 or 9 before I was able to start putting things back together again successfully, though.

    The worst is when you crack something open, and all of a sudden all of the parts don't fit inside anymore (like coil-wound springs :-)
  • Maria is edefinitely not normal.
  • My angle? Well, he's wrong ;)

    But no, really, it doesn't mean "upgrade". The word you'd use for a (memory) upgrade is zosetsu, or more generally, appugureedo.

    To give you a better "feel" for the word, kaizo is made up of the characters "to revise" and "to make". Among similar words using the first character are kaizen ("improvement") and kaishin ("repentment"), as well as kaichiku ("renovation (of buildings)"), kaikaku ("reformation") and kaizan ("tampering", also used for alteration of web pages). Words using the second character include zosen ("ship construction") and kenzobutsu ("building" or "construction").

    Basically, you'd use kaizo for something where you were altering an object, but not necessarily improving it; rather, converting it to meet your own needs. It's commonly used to describe the things that young males in Japan do to their cars or motorcycles; adding fins, spoilers, wide wheel wells, etc.


  • If you saw the way some English speakers use Japanese, you wouldn't be laughing so much...

  • > Actually reworking SMT is not all that hard. I used to assemble PCMCIA video cards
    > (204 pin TQFP, some SOJ, a handful of 1206 resistors and capacitors, etc.) with
    > nothing more than a pair of tweezers and a fine pitch soldering iron.

    Well, I have two points to make ..

    1) you were presumably trained or taught yourself, you must have made a mess of things a lot of times before you learnt ...

    2) you were presumably paid to have a skill to do this

    you said yourself you made mistakes, how many people who read these are going to be able to achieve this, the only reason it isn't hard to you is because you have practise. The real big danger here is someone is going to see this, and try it ... and then turn their Palm into a paperweight

    you make it sound simple, and I admit it is. but whilst what to do is simple enough, the actual doing of it isn't - it needs practise, skill and a steady hand. (or i suppose a powdered solder/flux mix you can paint on, and a soldering iron with a wide tip to heat a side at once :)

    Back to the main reason for this post though ..
    you say it is easy, when for 99% of people it isn't, and I had to point out the real world here :)

  • 1) you were presumably trained or taught yourself, you must have made a mess of things a lot of times before you learnt ...
    2) you were presumably paid to have a skill to do this

    Actually previous to that job I hadn't ever done SMT work or rework. I was an ace solderer though, having ruined a good many boards in my youth. That technique was taught to me at that job and while the first couple of boards didn't look all that hot, they did work (couple loose connections which when reflowed were fine). I was paid to solder them up using the technique they taught

    That technique isn't necessary on the M100, as the pins on the PSRAM aren't really fine pitch and you can touch each one without much trouble.

    The real big danger here is someone is going to see this, and try it ... and then turn their Palm into a paperweight

    They saw the pics... if they're ballsy enough to try it, then I guess they'd already weighed the risks associated with palm modifications.

    you make it sound simple, and I admit it is. but whilst what to do is simple enough, the actual doing of it isn't - it needs practise, skill and a steady hand.

    I agree... there is an amount of steadiness and skill to it. I had replied to your comment because you made it sound like a tantamount feat... it really isn't, and chances are unless you have a 900 degree iron or a 5W iron you'll mangle the board, but if you have a decent iron and the patience to do it, you'll do just fine.

  • I bought a cd changer 3 days ago and a disk got stuck in it so I opened her up and all's well. No way I wanted to pay for servicethat soon.
  • 68k to be exact (Rev A was 10Mhz running at 8, RevB is 12Mhz running at 10)

    Mark Duell
  • Zarf's Catalog v1.0 (Z'Catalog) can be used to set the backup bit on everything so it all gets Hotsynced
  • Shop sign I saw in Japan: "Every Day Low Plice"

    Well, English is a difficult language...

  • Quite ironic, countering a stereotype with a stereotype. How liberal of you!
  • Wow.

    This is one hack that impresses me, for many reasons. Not the least of which, is the language. Perhaps I should get drunk, and write all my documentation in Japanese. The English page is great poetry- Too bad Slashdot won't allow tags so that I can do it proper justice.

    Molly, you just made my .sig. Thanks!

    First, nothing begins if not opening.

    Since the body isn't composed of glue like PalmV about m100,

    opening out is simple.

    But, it is because the used screw is special.

    " T5-Type" not too generally is necessary.

    _________________

  • Even more amazing.

    I just got off the phone, with a vendor who had, until recently been supplying me with Expendable Bathythermographs. I've always liked their model "T5" probes because they range deeper and faster than anything currently available. Sadly, all that the vendor could tell me was, "they aren't too commonly requested, so we stopped making them."

    Damn. I need to consult slashdot before making any purchasing decisions in the future....

  • See my post [slashdot.org].

    .........

  • I got my Palm V upgraded from Tony Rudenko at http://www.palmpilotupgrade.com/. I just got it back today. Only 8 days after I sent it, and that includes a weekend. Check it out. It is really worth it. It does not even look like it was opened up! It is perfect! He also speeds up the CPU if you would like. He has also done over 100 of these with a 100% success rate. Give it a shot!
  • Wasn't that an AC/DC song from around 1980?

  • I used to sometimes carry around small MS-DOS executables on my HP48-Sx calculator. It had kermit, after all. Things like that marvel of utilites: Dirmagic, which was like 8K bytes.

    8K? Ouch! I had a 48G...so I only had 32K to work with. I rarely had more then 3K free at any one time...what with Tetris, Columns, Xmodem, and a stack enhancer...

  • just bear in mind that not *everything* gets backed up in a hotsync

    As ashpool7 pointed out, you can force everything to be backed up by setting all the backup bits, and you can use a freeware program to set all the backup bits.

    For everyday use, I suggest BackupBuddy [backupbuddy.com]. Each and every HotSync will back up everything perfectly.

    steveha

  • From an early age I have always taken things apart, but I have learnt my limits. I now do not mess with electronics on a board level, but I will disassemble everything that I can with the tools that I own. I recently inherited from a friend, a receiver which was intermitantly working, turned out to be a dusty power-switch ... I think that this is natural curiosity, and that people that do not pull things apart as soon as they get a chance have an underdeveloped sense of curiosity, and they are the oddballs. NF

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