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!