Archos tablet 10.1 repair

My Archos 10.1 died. The death was not sudden. At first, the charging was slower, after a while I noticed “blink blink problem“. After few days the tablet turned int a brick. I realised it was the time for some action…

Opening Archos 10.1  is fairly simple. There are 6 small torx srews and dozen of plastic clips around the case holding both sides together. To separate plastic parts use your nails or similar “material”, which is softer than plastics to avoid scratches. There is plastic lid covering all side connectors. Camera is within rubber holder and MIC has one rubber cover. Remove all tiny parts into safe place.

Two flex capton foils connects LCD side with periphery. Wider has dual row connector and narrower, 4 pin ribbon (probably the touch controller) has small connector. Remove orange adhesive tapes and pull the wider ribb on out from the board. Open the small connector (black part up!) and pull out the ribbon. Now warm up your soldering iron and unsolder the battery from the circuit (red B+ wire) to avoid “escaping smoke” effects. Isolate the red wire with some isolation!

 

 

Now it’s time to check some nice and interesting components inside Archos 10.1 tablet. I noticed Bluetooth/WiFi module next to the volume buttons. The antenna is simple “F” dipole:

There is place for connector for external antenna (maybe my next project). Adaptation is fairly simple: drilling a hole in the housing, removing the jumper between connector pads and LC filter and soldering SMD RF connector. Souds very simpla. It could improve the performance of the wifi/bluetooth. The BT/WiFi is controlled by single chip solution. Is it CSR? The chip has no marks and is chip scale package. Next to BT/Wifi controller is probably RAM.

The BALUN for the antenna is single chip ceramic component (it is used to match the balanced symetrical radio output impedance to 50 ohm single ended antenna):

Audio is served by Wolfson stereo CODEC WM8988 (RV-Wolfson-datasheet-8647166). Interesting chip, available also via farnell.

 

The sound is amplified with two amplifiers 8JAM892. I don’t know the producer nor the part number.

Camera module is marked as DL030 – A70101:

Power management chip is intersil ISL 9220 IRTZ (datasheet: ISL 9220IRTZ)

The LCD seems to operate via LVDS interface. The controller is from texas instruments, part number SN75LVDS83B, datasheet: http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/sn75lvds83b.pdf

Next to this controller is HDMI chip from NXP, part number 89A85 or TDA19989AET (TDA19989 datasheet)

64MB ram is from Micron, part number is MT46H64M32LFMA-6 IT http://www.micron.com/parts/dram/mobile-ddr-sdram/mt46h64m32lfma-6-it

 

The toshiba NAND flash is one peace of art. It’s made of stacked chips, read more here. Part number is this random sequence of characters: thgbm2g7d4fbai9.

Power management is done with another nice chip from Texas instruments, part number TPS65921 http://www.ti.com/product/tps65921

Capacitive touch screen has two chips. One is Tango S32, produced by PixCIR: http://www.pixcir.com.cn/english/products1.asp

There is another chip on touch controller board, part number TR16C0 (I found out it is USB HID device, with multitouch up to 24 inch display, additionally with I2C interface). http://www.touchplus.com.tw/

 

The repair was simple. The power connector failed, I removed it from the board, bended springs, soldered it back and now it operates as new. At the same time I attached the screw holders back to the housing. That was consequence from couple of unintentional crash tests.

 

There are some other chips left, whic I was not able to identify. I wil apreciate any help identifying those chips.

Photos are available via following thumbnails:

 

 

 

7 Comments

  1. atypic says:

    Hi!

    I really like what you are doing here, very hacker spirited 🙂

    I followed the link on http://www.sonsivri.to/ to this page. On that forum, you say that you have created Altium SCH for the EFM32-family. Would it be possible for me to get these? I can’t get Altium to import the OLBs, it just says “unrecognized file” when I use the import Wizard.

    Thank you on forehand,
    atypic

  2. fabian garcia says:

    Hi i would like to asi you if the screen could be used as a pc monitor vía some controller board board,thanks for your answer.

    • Mare says:

      Hi,

      I think not. The LCD is connected directly to controller board. Unfortunately I did not investigate anything around LCD.

  3. Neorpheus says:

    I understand that this is a bit of an older post, but you seem to be one of the few other people online that have asked this question. Did you ever find out what that “A1870” IC was that was on the board that splitz the power rails from the main board to the 2 lion cells? I’m not opposed to salvaging chips/boards. And being able to automatically charge/discharge 2 batteries with a single salvaged IC would be great. But I’m not keen on wiring up random unknown chips so it would be great if you had managed to find a data sheet.

  4. Neorpheus says:

    Thanks for the data sheet. I wasn’t having any luck on account of omitting the leading “uP” from the part name. I assume they are still using this to switch the battery leads between the 2 cells, but under the direction of that battery management IC on the main board instead. Guess my salvage dreams got shot down. Thanks again!