The ware for April 2024 is shown below:
In some ways, this is a much easier ware than last month’s, but I wonder if anyone will be able to name the precise function of this ware. Thanks to Ole for taking the photo, and for the adventures en route to the teardown!
This is a cell phone main logic board.
There are three FPC connectors. One for a display, one for a touch screen, and one for the SIM tray assembly?
And from the size of the board, I’m thinking this is from one of those miniature phones that are often bought for the purpose of smuggling into places where phones are not allowed. :)
You know, it might be for a GPS. You don’t need much GPU nor CPU for that and a simple touch display would be enough. You don’t need a mic either.
As willmore states above this is a cellphone, or at least a device that connects to a cell network and has a microphone, which, well, really splitting hairs there. The MT6580A is a 3G (WCDMA) SOC, but the USB connector appears to be C instead of Micro-AB, which I’d expect from a 3G phone. The board itself is also rather petite relative to the size of the SD card slot while having user-accessed features on at least three edges. I take those features to mean that, unlike the mainboards of a lot of flagship smartphones, this mainboard is roughly the same dimensions of the device itself, and that device is not a phablet. Drilling through specs of “tiny” android phones on Aliexpress, could this be a Soyes XS 11 mini phone? That seems to match with the same Mediatek processor model, and the KMF720012M chip size.
Good guss, but based on the quick spot of the board from that phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X3X5S87LiI at 04:15, that’s not the phone. :(
I was also confused by the USB-C vs micro USB-B connector as well. That points to a more recent design in my mind.
Evokes the impression of being the PCB of the lower half of a flip-phone…
That’s what I was also thinking. I would expect it to be more rectangular if it were in a normal smart phone rectangular slab type of design, but that tapering near the USB port really screams flip phone, doesn’t it?
The button layout also say flip phone to me. A slab phone would have three buttons–power and two volume keys. But a flip phones do things differently. Also, see the soldered power connection at the bottom left? That just looks like a keypad backlight connection.
I notice the single U.FL antenna connector and no PCB antennas, which fits the flip-phone theory because the antenna would be in the upper half of the case and connected via coax through the hinge.
The through-hole soldered connection labelled NTC next to the USB port doesn’t seem very cellphone-ish. Maybe some kind of asset tracker.
That’s next to the + and – for the soldered in battery. It’s just the temp sensors for the battery.
Ah yes, good point!
The PCB is recent (datecode november 2023, USB Type-C connector), the target low end enough to employ an old smartphone SOC and the cheapest multi chip package (1 GB LPDDR3 + 8 GB eMMC), 4 side mounted switches of which one recessed (volume +/-, power on and recessed reset switch?), miniature RF connector likely for WiFi antenna, microSD slot, battery powered. The board is tapered on the USB connector and there are many mounting holes, hinting emphasis on case robustness.
The MT6580A can both encode and decode 1080p H.264 video and supports HDMI out, but the presence of microphone contacts and the lack of any type of HDMI connector exclude the use in tv set-top boxes.
Both CPU and GPU are good enough for casual games or to emulate 1990s consoles and one handheld game console (Retroid Rocket 2+) employs the very SOC, but the board lacks both button pads and headphone output.
As willmore and Ben pointed out, there are smartphones equipped with this SOC, both feature phones and miniature Android smartphones. But the ongoing phase out of 2G and/or 3G networks in many markets limits the usefulness as a phone.
My take is a portable video recording/playing device which streams on WiFi, e.g. dashcam or wifi baby monitor kit
uhhhh is this not a flipper chip/usb-output chip for rpi-similar custom phones/wifi sniffers? also, hi, all :)
Glucose monitor, perhaps?
Clearly cellphone-adjacent technology, but it looks like it’s set up for wifi-only.
The absence of solder and an empty 12-pin pad layout inside the shield area near the microphone pads Initially made me think it was optional and not fitted, but it may just be surface contacts.
There is an amplifier IC, wifi antenna socket, SD card slot, and onboard battery with USB-C. I would say this is likely some sort of specialised camera unit, possibly a 360 degree camera?