62
Condor
6y

An entire night I've spent on this shit.. preparing wires, soldering them on the motherboard, and finally connecting everything up to current meters, my PC's USB port and a lithium cell from my old Doogee phone that I still had laying around. All in the hopes to get an adb shell. But all in vain.. the turd doesn't even want to boot up. What a fantastic waste of time 😑
(Apologies for the terrible picture quality btw, this tablet's camera is absolute garbage)

Comments
  • 3
    What was this supposed to be? having a displayless motherboard connected as an adb shell, but what would that be useful for?
  • 15
    @JoshBent It's the phone that got destroyed a few days ago. Just picked it out of the trashcan and disassembled it, then found that Acer had helpfully put some pads for the most important pins (VBAT, GND, VBUS, D+, D- etc) on its main motherboard. Since I had configured adb for the phone before, I knew that if I could get this to boot up, I'd be able to adb shell into it, get a root shell and finally install some packages using pm. Ultimately I'd hoped to make a little VNC server out of it.. but alas :')
  • 5
    @Condor damn, sounds like a nice project, you scraped it already or going to still try to get it to boot?
  • 8
    @JoshBent not sure to be honest. Under the loupe it looked like there's a few caps (?) that seem to have detached from the board, which may have caused it to refuse booting up. But knowing Acer, I doubt that they'd give me the values of them in a circuit schematic. I'm afraid that this project is done for :(
  • 1
    @Condor detached as in lost?
  • 6
    @JoshBent yep, completely gone.. if only I still had them, I could've used my new multimeter to measure the capacitance and order new ones, but without them that's impossible...
    Time to cut my losses I guess. Gonna try to find a secondhand Nexus 6P and get going with that instead :)
  • 2
    @Condor it's very rare, but do look for some repair guide or schematics first, sometimes you just get really lucky finding one
  • 7
    @JoshBent I highly doubt that one exists for this one to be honest... This phone was only sold in Belgium and France, and when I asked Acer for kernel source they were very defensive, so I doubt that they or some determined hardware hacker has reverse engineered and published it. I was very lucky to even have had a French developer's TWRP for this thing, so that I could root and install Xposed. Other than that, nothing.. not even disassembly guides if I recall correctly.
    Edit: well one general guide (as in disassembly to the boards but not to individual components) from a Russian guy, but that's it :/
  • 4
    Sorry for not getting it running, but my biggest respect for trying it. I like those hardcore DIY projects.

    Confuzius says: "The journey is the reward"
  • 8
    @ddephor Thanks! And yeah the journey is definitely the reward. It's great training experience, and very delighting to have found out that I can now work on small electronics like this. Some of the pads (D- in particular) were very close to others and hidden between other components.. nice to know that I can now get comfortable with this and SMD in general :)
  • 2
    Few devices require special battery to start. Mainly they require connection with the battery chip.
    If you donthave the original one its going tobe extremly difficult to make it work.

    Also everytime i see electronic projects i give ++
  • 7
    @Gregozor2121 shit! Didn't know that.. now I've disassembled this battery and during the process destroyed what I assumed to be the protection PCB. The pack had 4 connectors, so I'll have to check if they just have 2 pads shorted for + and - or actually provided useful data with the others.. all of it covered in shmoo though.. probably Acer didn't expect anyone to actually disassemble this battery (and for good reason, there's many dangers involved).
  • 7
    @Gregozor2121 fffuuu.. you're right. They've got this pad called ID which apparently is shorted to pin 3 of the battery pack controller. Fuck! I should've tested this first..!
  • 2
    That's a masterpiece in my point of view!
  • 3
    @Condor
    Finally my knowlege of random electronic facts had helped somebody!
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