Friday, January 4, 2013

Motorola Surfboard SBG6580... to pieces and beyond

So this year did not start well for me. When I finally woke up on the 2nd of January my internet kept going down on me. After numerous restarts and resets of my wonderful modem/router combo it died. The top 3 lights would flash for a sec and then nothing. That is the last time I buy one of these all-in-ones (on a side note, don't get the Belkin wireless router it restarts every time you change any settings).

Anyway here is what I found inside it:

A main board with a mini PCI Express slot.

Front of main board


and the other side

Back of main board


There were 2 heat sinks on the Broadcom chips but I removed them. Actually the small one is a perfect fit for my RaspberryPi.

The most important piece from this is the wi-fi card. I might use it to upgrade my wife's 4 year old laptop to a wireless n but I need to find out more about the board.

Here is a close up:
Back of wi-fi board

The strange part was that those 2 eyelets were actually soldered to the frame. They wanted to be sure that the card will not fall out of it's slot.












Front of wi-fi board




A lot of serial numbers and some notations of pin numbers are visible.













There are also 2 antennas. I am not sure how good they are since I didn't have that good of a signal 3 meters away from the router (behind a wall)

Front of antenna 1
Back of antenna 1

Front of antenna 2

Back of antenna 2

And some pictures of the markings on the chips.


The heart is the BCM3380 chip I think it is a common one in these kind of devices
BCM3380GKFSBG
The BCM33115 chip might be the Ethernet chip since it is placed so close to the ports but I couldn't find any info on this one

BCM33115SKFBG

A Hynix ram chip next to the main processor

H5PS5162FFA

I will post updates when I try to use that mini wi-fi card.

Update

 Check out the Wi-Fi install on a HP Compaq 6715s

And here are some pics with the removed heat sinks from the main board:
The 2 heat sinks from the Motorola Surfboard SGB6580
Small heat sink installed on RaspberryPi
Small heat sink installed on RaspberryPi



That's all for now, enjoy life!

8 comments:

  1. I cannot get inside this thing to save my life. Are there hidden clips that I am not seeing? How did you take it apart?

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    Replies
    1. If you look in the first pic you will see some plastic tabs at the bottom, there are a few of those. The thing is mine was broken and didn't really take notice of how to take it apart, I destroyed the chassis in the process.

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  2. That's actually a BCM53115 chip for the ethernet

    Also managed to track down the RAM on the Hynix website. http://www.hynix.com/products/support/partnumberdecoder.jsp It's the DDR2 Component PDF.

    DDR2 SDRAM
    1.8V
    512Mb 8K/64ms Refresh
    "Organization: X16"
    "4 Banks"

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Which kind of connector for the WiFi antennas? I'm going to mod the thing with external ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. it's a standard UFL connector, the same used in laptop wi-fi cards

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    2. you would need a UFL to SMA adapter cable so you can plug in a standard external antenna.

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  5. Tämä on paras puhelin Mototrbo DMR

    ReplyDelete