A further look into the TI-Nspire Lab Cradle

In a previous news, as amazing as it could seem, we were discovering that the TI-Nspire Lab Station Cradle was based on a real Nspire calculator hardware! Grin

Further tests on the cradle kept conforting this hypothesis more and more.

Today, let's make the final test - let's open the cradle!

The PCB seems to be divided in 2 parts, the left part dealing with the sensors connectors.
And on the right part, yes!!! There are known Nspire chips! Grin

We immediatly notice the ASIC chip "TI-NS2007C-0 Magnum Zevio" coming with 2nd generation Nspire (TouchPad), when 1st generation Nspire (ClickPad) were including a different "TI-NS2006A-1 LSI Logic Zevio" ASIC.

Near the ASIC, no surprise we can find usual chips:

a 32MB NAND Flash ROM chip, here a K9F5608R0D from SEC (chip including the Boot2, the Diags software, the OS and the data)
a 32MB SDRAM chip, here a K4M56163PI from SEC

But, there is still a big surprise: although it seems to be based on the 2nd generation Nspire hardware, we can notice a NOR Flash ROM chip: cFeon EN39SL800! Shocked

That chip used to include the Boot1 on 1st generation Nspire, and had been removed from 2nd generation Nspire. We then supposed the Boot1 was moved to the ASIC on TouchPad Nspire models.

So in the end, it seems that the ASIC "TI-NS2007C-0 Magnum Zevio" is able to accept two different Boot1 configurations:

an internal Boot1 programmed directly into the ASIC
an external Boot1 programmedon another NOR Flash ROM chip

Why do they use an external Boot1 in TI-Nspire Lab Cradle?
It might be because the "TI-NS2007C-0 Magnum Zevio" ASIC chips are coming programmed with the TI-Nspire calculator 1.1.8916 Boot1. In this configuration the ASIC would ignore the internal Boot1 incompatible with the different Nspire Lab Cradle hardware and use the external specific Boot1.

The other side of the PCB is nothing interesting. We can notice the 5 sensors connectors (3 analogic and 2 diginal/numeric), but no hidden connector unlike the TI-CBL2.

Adding that the TI-Nspire ViewScreen panel is also based on a Nspire calculator hardware (a TI-Nspire CAS+ this time), it's curious how Texas Instruments reuse calculator hardware to design non-calculator devices.

Bigger images are available from the TI-Planet news:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9251