Teardown Of An USB-C Cable With Built-in LCD
The previous years we’ve got been seeing screens pop up in lots of new locations, however seeing them in USB-C cables continues to be a little bit of a novel factor. Out of sheer curiosity [Aaron Christophel] just lately took apart one of these, to see what’s inside and what else you are able to do with them past fondling its single contact management and watch reported voltages and present.
Naturally, these gadgets aren’t precisely meant to be serviced by anybody, so the largest problem is to get into them with out an excessive amount of violence. Risking a blood sacrifice to the Hardware Gods, [Aaron] first assaults the show cowl of this €15, 240 Watt-rated UGreen cable with sharp utensils earlier than simply taking aside the aluminium case, which in the end will get him inside.
After this it’s clear that attacking the show cowl was the suitable means, simply requiring figuring out the place to use stress so as to invert the meeting course of. Following that it’s not clear the way it was assembled, although it might have concerned liberal quantities of glue after sliding within the elements. Rather than bothering with making use of warmth, as a substitute some side-cutters rapidly handle that pesky aluminium shell.
The tiny IPS LC show is connected by way of a flat flex cable to the PCB with a connector, with the PCB that includes a number of voltage regulators, a MOSFET for the backlight and different elements along with the EN32LF056 marked MCU. After some prodding on the uncovered SWD interface, it was confirmed to be a Cortex-M0+-based MCU with 64 kB of Flash and 4 kB of SRAM, which made it simple sufficient to make use of the little show to show some video frames of everybody’s favourite artist.
Since this MCU is just wired as much as measure currents and voltages it can’t use the USB interface, however with some information of how you can non-destructively disassemble one in every of these connectors at the least to the purpose of accessing the SWD pads beneath the show it could possibly be a enjoyable get together trick to reflash the firmware with one thing customized.
