starting off tonight with infinite reflection baltic porter from sookrum's brewing in winnipeg they described it as having roasty coffee aromatics alongside robust malt flavors and heats of dark fruit so i wasn't planning on doing another teardown so soon after the last one but i was up walking around and this tear down pretty much literally dropped in my lap so here we go one muddy skanky old oh god what a mess um cable modem i probably should have cleaned that up before i did this but you know we're here now so let's go with it this is an ares model tm-602 g cable modem on the back we can see that it has an f-type cable tv connector a ac power input there's a reset button there it's a usb connection there is a ethernet connection it's labeled 10 100 so obviously not the most modern pieces of equipment and it has two rj11 telephone jacks on it this particular box is used by our local cable company just as a digital telephone terminal nothing else it can do more but that's all they use it for i guess because it is older equipment here's the manufacturer's data sheet they oh hey with integrated battery backup hmm i may have to extract that if it and see if it's any good so this thing is capable basically over the cable tv plant of providing two voice over ip lines that plug into normal telephone jacks so you can use your old landline phone or reuse it plus high speed data access again high speed being up to 100 megabit per second it runs on the docsis 2 cable standard high speed internet as we said by a 10 or 100 oh okay or ethernet over usb 1.1 that's what it does interesting so they keep going on about this battery option includes the first and only two cell lithium ion solution for up to eight hours of standby okay based on the language of that and the fact that it's only got a 10 100 ethernet connection i'm going to guess this is quite old technology there's the specs if you're interested you can pause this at some point if you want oh yes it is old technology 2008 wow not much else to learn here let's just tear the thing apart obviously i'm not going to use it for anything and boy is my workbench going to need cleaning up after this so on this side we have the battery compartment that came out easily enough that looks like ah now it looks like it's a strap to yank the battery out but obviously it doesn't want to come out if you thought that last teardown was violent you ain't seen nothing yet so there's the battery pack it claims to be 8.4 volts 400 milliamp hours charges at 115 milliamps or 33 watt hours okay what are the odds that a 2008 vintage battery is going to have any jam left in it at all i think we'll set that aside for later exploration and see what's in here underneath all that of course now the question is how to get into it the obvious choice is to look underneath there for screws yep the feet always hide the screws looks like there's four of them here will that fit that'll do okay but i doubt it there is that that is just the case and does it just lift right out oh wow that's nice okay uh there's some light pipes for the leds on the front panel ah we've got the connector for the battery that might come in handy if the battery is any good at all let me just uh right that's a lot less muddy and messy first thing we have over here is a very obvious power supply section there is the ac coming in we have an mov we have a thermistor we have a fuse a capacitor across it then we have a couple of uh chokes in series with that that's all just going to clean up the power both coming in and whatever ugliness this thing creates going back out again then we have our good old friend the full bridge rectifier no i'm not going to say it like he does followed by a big smoothing capacitor and then over here we have a chip and a transistor couldn't find any information about that one online but i'm going to guess it's a switchboard power supply chip and we have a transformer bridging over the generous slots there look at that that is some isolation we have also bridging across the gap to opto isolators which will be providing feedback into this guy and we have a little capacitor in there i think it's class y is it class x1 y1 capacitor so that looks like a very solidly designed power supply good isolation good filtering on it exactly what you'd expect to see so after the transformer as you'd expect we have a dual diode we have some filtering capacitors we have a couple of transistors and a couple of diode packages in slot 23 format that will be creating the reference for and driving the led side of those two guys uh what else do we have in here a couple of inductors down in there i'm assuming those are just filtering to go with these this guy is marked you and i can't read its designation but since it's got you know capacitor and a larger inductor it's probably either a boost or a box circuit going on in there so over here we have what are you lm324 which is a dual op amp package so i'm going to guess that that has to do with measuring the the charging circuit possibly uses comparator for the for the battery voltages on the charging possibly looking at battery balancing because there's so many pins over there another diode package several of those heavy diode packages okay so that will all be dealing with the battery charging and there is a battery indicator battery status indicator and just to the left of that whole setup we have a little what looks like a programming header not a lot of labeling on the back of it a few zero ohm resistors around it for some reason there's very little going on in the back there's a few passives a couple of diodes and stuff like that um that one little transistor but then we have this package up in the corner here let's see what he is zylolog zbf082ah blah blah blah ah a date code as 42nd week of 2009. that goes along with the 2008 that was in the manual so that dates this thing pretty precisely that zylog chip is an 8-bit microcontroller with extended peripherals oh it's got all kinds of stuff going on inside it gpio internal oscillator 10-bit analog to digital and all comparators temperature sensors uart all the things you would expect from a microcontroller anyway let's get back to what we were looking at before we got distracted there so i got all these little surface mount leds up front that went through some light pipes that i already threw in the garbage because they were disgusting uh what is this little chip down here m28313cs can't find the exact match for him but most of the things with the same root look like 128k eprom so i'm gonna say that's probably what it is though if it's an eprom it's a little bit far away from the processing going on where's that other microcontroller it's way over there so yeah i'm guessing that it probably belongs to one of these big guys in here so now over on the left hand side those transformers the big diodes and capacitors those lead me to believe that we are talking to the two phone lines two rj45 jacks or rj11 jacks sorry and normally you would just expect these to be two parallel ones but no they're not if you look they're two separate circuits going back here and everything's mirrored so and in the data sheet we saw for the device that it can have two different voice over ip uh lines on it so that's what's going on in there some line driving down there everything else isolation from the line although i would have expected those transformers to be way over here but yeah whatever it's even got a pair of 330 ohm resistors you know one for each line of each circuit just to match the 600 ohm nominal impedance of a dial-up phone line cool i'm guessing that this dude is in charge of the telephony stuff let me go see if i can find that data sheet dual channel wideband tracking battery voice port device battery because on a telephone line on a standard uh dial-up telephone line there is voltage on the pair with the audio and in telephony terms it's called battery voltage this chip is designed for exactly this purpose i don't see any beet soup in here they were just really reaching for that acronym so now then we get down into these three big chips in here this ti chip again i couldn't find a lot of information on it but i'm going to guess that it is dealing with the ethernet stuff um just because there's the ethernet and the usb network connection which both have lines going back to it so that makes a certain amount of sense then these two with custom firmware on them let me just peel those two stickers off and see if we can see what the chip is underneath them although i'm not holding out a lot of hope that this is going to tell us much hynux hy5du561622 ftp okay and this guy here when i cleaned the goop off it i think i scrubbed part of the part number off i'm gonna look a little bit closer and see what i can find on that but i'm not holding out a lot of hope we'll see well that wasn't so hard to find after all it's just 256 megs of ddr sd ram and that other one after staring at it for a while under various bits of magnification is a 32 meg flash memory okay sure so those two will be serving that big ti chip in the middle all right so that makes sense that is ram and a flash memory servicing this big ti chip that i can't find out anything about which is obviously going to be a processor with ethernet and usb natively on it there is a crystal that is no doubt clocking it you can actually see some traces going from it through the loading capacitors into it so that makes sense also it's got some programming headers down there which also makes sense to have close to that show that is most of the mysteries at least as far as i can get except for what's underneath this rf shielding can here nice it's not soldered down now first thing in after the connector we have a bunch of inductors bunch of capacitors this big honking inductor and more little surface mount adductors so that is just rf filtering with two different sections over here one will be transmit one will be received onto the cable at different frequencies because the uplink and downlink on a cable tv plant is significantly different frequencies uh we have a chip in there looks like ti logo on it and a crystal in here we have a that's probably a transformer and a handful of passives okay and what else is going on down in there can we see any closer you know what i got this thing from being good to use i might as well use it okay that's better so there you can get a little bit closer look at the input section the rf input section to the outside world with all of its inductors and stuff and i stand by my original suggestion that that is the combining filtering of both the receive and transmit section going out that connector there so now we'll slide over closer to this little chip in its environment what does that crystal say 16 mig it's reasonable for a clock am i two zero is that a five six maybe a e hm i don't recognize that logo initially i thought it was ti from a distance but when you get up close that ain't it well there we go that wasn't so hard to find after all it is a single chip broadband tuner which i guess makes sense can tune anywhere from 48 megahertz up to one gigahertz 3.3 volt power supply
no tunable parts required it does everything inside cool it also has some gpio so that it can be controlled which makes sense operates with a 16 mig crystal yes it does applications in voip telephony modems cable modems and packet cable wow that's exactly what it's being used for we'll zoom back out again see what else is in there fl 20 that is going to just be an rf filter but other than that it's just a whole bunch of capacitors and resistors on that side let's go over to this other side here the other side of the splitter essentially so that first side so this side will be receiving the incoming signal which means that this side will be probably doing the transmitting i'm guessing signals coming from there i'm not sure i don't see anything generating rf in there couple of what looks like diode packages in sot 23 type packages and then that guy is going to be a transformer this guy here what else is going on in there not too much in that side hmm for an rf uh enclosure i was expecting a lot more weirdness but that's fairly standard kind of stuff in there okay so i think that is about all the intelligence we can gain out of this board without you know going crazy on it the last thing i want to do is crack open this battery here hopefully we'll blow myself up and uh see what's inside it and see if they can be salvaged just peel that bit off and this is going to be heat sealed together which means more violence and abuse as we've learned from our scottish friend using the right tool for the job is exactly what you need and you're gonna get violent with these things aha that sounds successful this sticker out of the way oh no i avoided the warranty whatever will i do oh look it's 18 650s what a novel technology you know they were talking about how it was a new technology at the time now let's see if we can get those out of there let's see okay that's what it is it's uh 2s2p two in series two in parallel there's one end there's the other end and there's some balanced charging leads okay i don't expect to find any voltage on there oh hey 2.1 volts on that guy 2.0 volts on that guy 2.0 volts in that guy and this would be 2.1 because series parallel hmm those might actually be rescuable after all oh a protection circuit that may have saved us oh and all i'm impressed with the build quality of this product the design nice fuse on the battery module that's a very nice touch i'm guessing that is the charge control and that will be two mosfets that disconnect it probably i like it i'm not going to use it but i like it now i will disconnect these into individual cells and throw them into my battery conditioner charger unit here and uh see what happens with them well that was another successful and entertaining teardown and i might even get lucky and get some uh some cells out of it that i can use this thing didn't immediately say abort mission when i plugged it in so maybe they're still good we'll see it's going to take some time i'm charging them slowly so this crusty rusty old board i don't know that there's anything of any value for me to salvage off it the connectors are all corroded um maybe you know the bridge rectifier some of those capacitors maybe the mov but other than that there's not a lot of salvage value in this thing maybe the telephone isolation transformers because those are going to be just a one to one 600 ohm transformer so that could come in handy maybe for audio isolation kind of purposes other than that so there's not that much of value on there other than entertainment value oh thanks again for watching i appreciate that always um any questions or comments down in the comment section as usual i'll put the results of these uh these lithium ion cells uh down in the description after i finished messing with them i'm going to run them through a charge discharge cycle a couple of times and just see what they can do um yeah that's everything for tonight thanks for watching talk to you later
2022-05-11