From: lepton@panix.com (Mike O'Connor)Newsgroups: comp.sys.newton.miscSubject: Inside the Newton MP2000 - A TourDate: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 18:53:55 -0400I got a Newton MessagePad 2000! It's great, I LOVE gadgets. I wonder what'sinside it?Opening the Newton MP2000 is foolish. You will void the warantee. You maybreak the device. You may rip a wire. You may break the tabs that hold thecase together. You may lose your data. You may hate yourself if you do it.DON'T OPEN YOUR NEWTON. DON'T DO IT.I'm one of those idiots with his head in the clouds. I think I know it alland can do it all. I was warned. But I opened it - and lived! Theseinstructions show how I did it, and give you a tour of the inside. If youdo it, don't blame me when even if you follow what I wrote exactly. IWARNED YOU. DON'T DO IT. Just open the box mentally, it is much safer. HaveI written enough disclaimers? OK.Make sure you have backed up everything fully. Your internal data is goingto be lost, so make sure you can restore it.The six sides of the case are:FRONT = The screen side of the Newton.BACK = The side of the Newton with the MessagePad 2000 label on it.TOP = The side of the Newton with the AC and serial port sockets.BOTTOM = The side, umm, opposite the top.PC CARD SIDE = The side with the PC card slots.HINGE SIDE = The side with the screen cover hings and power switch.Remove any PC cards.Remove the pen.Remove the battery pack. After several minutes, the internalsupercapacitor, which keeps enough power for you to change batterieswithout losing data, in the Newton will drain and all your internal datawill be gone.Open the door at the top of the case which covers the AC and serial sockets.Remove the cover completely by unlatching it at the hinge. By the way,there is a little peice of plastic right in the carck between the twohalves of the case, near the top of the hinge. This is a little cover for aslot where a ribbon cable could come out someday, if someone made, forexample, a screen cover which had a built in keybord. This plastic thing isgoing to fall out when you open the case.Make sure you have a soft surface to place the Newton on, you don't want toscratch the exposed screen while you are working with it screen-down.Remove the four phillips head screws on the back of the case. No, the casewon't open yet, it is still securely closed.When we open the case, we will take the bottom half of the case off. Theguts of the Newton are attached to the top and sides of the case and so thescreen, big circuit boards and stuff won't come loose and spray all overthe place. But, some small, important parts WILL come loose when we open,so we must be careful.The Newton is held together by plastic tabs and latches. You must be verycareful not to break these. Take a look in the battery compartment, at theinside bottom edge of the case. You will see three of these latches alongthe bottom, one right at the entry of the battery compartment, one in themiddle, and one at the deep end. These latches are all around and are whatare still holding the case together. In each latch, the back half of thecase has a tab with a slot, and the front half of the case has the thingthat hooks into the slot.By checking out the latch closest to the opening of the battery slot, youcan get a good look at how to gently unhook it. You press in on the backhalf of the side of the case, and this frees the tab from the hook so youcan separate that part of the case. But you can't just do this all at once.The side of the case with the PC card slots will open relatively easily,but the side of the case with the hinge and power switch is very tightlyheld. We must use finesse.The latch at the bottom of the case near the opening of the batterycompartment unhooks easily, then unhook the one at the center of the bottomof the case, then the one on the other side. You should be able to get thebottom of the PC card side open about a quarter inch now, but the hingeside of the case is still held fast, as is the top of the case.On the PC card side of the case, there is no latch in the middle, but theone near the top is very difficult.Now if you examine the top edge of the case, you can see how it is going toseparate. The AC, serial port and cover are all going to stay with thefront of the case, as will the infrared port. The opening for the pen isgoing to come with the bottom of the case. The dark red plastic coveringthe infrared port is loose and is going to fall out when the case opens.With great difficulty, the next thing is to free the latch which is on thePC card side of the case, 3/8 from the top, very near the infrared port.You can't push in on the front part of the case under the latch because itis too solid, so you want to sort of make the top half of the case bulgeout a little, and then pull. This is where you will break some of theplastic in this latch and regret you ever started this operation. But witha little frightening force, much carefulness, patience and some luck youwill free this latch with no damage and be able to raise the case about ahalf inch or so. The plastic cover for the infrared port will fall out, putit aside.Now you can open the whole PC card side of the case about a half inch andget your first good peek inside. Latches near the pen holder and along thehinge side of the case still hold the back cover on. Don't pull it too faropen or you'll crack the back cover near the pen holder side of the AC portcover.Now, work on the latches in the recessed hinge section of the hinge side ofthe case. One latch is 3/4" above the bottom of the hinge section, anotheris 1 1/2" below the top of the hinge section. With the cover partly free,it is a little easier to push on the back part of the case to free theselatches. The corner of the case with the switch and pen holder is stillheld fast, so don't lift the case too high or you will crack the back ofthe case near where that little slot-cover thing is near the top of thehinge section. That slot-cover thing is loose and will fall out when thecase opens.Freeing this last corner is the hardest part. The power switch is secure tothe front half of the case, nothing will fall out there. The pen holderhole is covered by plastic which is part of the back of the case we areremoving, but the pen holder unit itself is secure to the front of thecase, as is all the circuitry. There are no wires or anything attached tothe back of the case that you have to worry about. You mainly have to worryabout not breaking the plastic case back.There is a latch on the hinge side, just under the power switch and abovethe slot-cover thingie. Once you get that unhooked, there is just one morelatch, which is between the pen holder and the AC cover.On this last latch, be careful not to lift the cover too high or you willcrack the plastic covering the pen holder hole. However, that is what youhave to do to free the latch. Be careful and extremely patient and all of asudden, the cover will come free!The Newton is open! Take that little plastic slot-cover thing and put itaside, and now we can take a good look at the unit.The indise of the back cover is silver. The Newton case is electricallycondictive, and serves as electromagnetic shielding. A thin, clear plasticsheet is glued to the inside of the cover, to keep the case from shortingout the circuits below. The cover also has those little plastic hook thingswhich hold the open screen cover. You can see how they are cleverly madewith tiny plastic springs. There is also the reset button, a little plasticbutton that in turn pushes against the real reset switch which is mountedon the main circuit board.The main circuit board is fairly tightly packed, but perhaps not as much asa state of the art cell phone might be. It is, however, filled with a largenumber of surface-mount components.The pen holder tube is a suprisingly solid unit, but if you peek in theopen edge of the tube along the hinge side, you can see the veryinteresting latching mechanism which holds the tip of the pen securely.The infrared module is enclosed in its own shiny metal case. There are twoLEDs to transmit light, and a third to receive.Down at the battery compartment, which is also a solidly made plastic hunk,you can see the metal lever which unlatches the battery. Even in anunopened unit, if you look in the battery compartment, you can see thatwhen you move the lever to unhook the battery, it moves a latch which ismidway down the battery compartment.In addition to the two power leads from the battery which make contact atthe deep end of the battery case, you can see that there are two additionalleads that make contact midway along the bottom side of the batterycompartment. If you peek inside the battery compartment you can make themout. These make contact with extra contacts on the rechargable batterypack. I believe they lead to a thermistor inside the battery pack itself,and that the Newton uses the internal temperature of the battery to helpgauge recharging and remaining battery time. I assume there is anotherthermistor on the main board itself to gauge the internal temperature ofthe Newton to compute an "ambient" temp to compare with the battery temp,but I didn't spot it. Note I assume this would be the temp of the inside ofthe unit, not of the air in the room.Next to the battery compartment, near its center, on the main circuitboard, is a relatively large wire-wound transformer. I believe that this ispart of a voltage converter which is used to power the backlight. This isthe thing that makes that slight humming noise you hear when the backlightis turned on.At the center of the PC side of the circuit board is the super capacitor.This holds a voltage, so that even when you have removed the battery, theNewton will not lose its memory for a while. This takes the place of thebackup battery which used to be in older models. [5.5V 0.10F]There are a number of sockets on the circuit board, and one of them holds arather large daughtercard! It is 2.4" by 1.6" with a corner cut out. It hasa substantial edge connector and is easily replacable (once you get thedarn cover off.) It is a 72 pin connector and the board removes and insertsjust like a SIMM or DIMM, with two side latches and you just lift it out.Only two chips are on this board, on the exposed side. However, theunderside has traces for four more chips! I suspect you could squish tenchips on this board if you really tried. Board markings: X1036YCZ andIBI,M4V0 Chips are Sharp dated 9707 marked LHME5BT3 and LHME5BT4.I don't have my books handy to tell me what any of the chips in the Newtonare, but the date marks mean the year 97 and the week 07 of manufacture.Thus, these chips were made in mid-Feburary and must have been placed inthe unit hot off the foundry line and shipped to yours truly to get it onemonth later.My guess is that these daughter board chips are ROM containing theoperating system. This would mean that the main ROMs in the Newton 2000 areeasily field replacable. I also assume that this baord could contain quitea bit of additional RAM or ROM if desired.In addition to the daughter board socket, there are little wired connectorsfor the power switch, infrared, AC. speaker, microphone and battery. Aribbon cable connector, at the center of the pen-holder edge of the board,connects to a ribbon cable which goes to the touch screen.There is also an empty connector toward the top of the board. This tiny32-pin connector is for an internal modem.If you look at the top of the case, under the top cover between the penholder hole and the AC socket, you will see a square peice of plastic. Thisis removable. Behind it is an emply place, about 0.6" deep which is wherean RJ phone jack will go. It looks like you could make a daughterboardwhich could be fairly substantial, say 2" by 1.5", that plugged into thissocket and also had the phone jack which would fit into this space.When opening the case, we notice that there is this little slot in the sideof the case, near the top of the hinge area of the hinge side of the case,which is covered by a peice of plastic. This could be a slot for a ribboncable. My speculation on this is that perhaps the modem connector can alsohandle a keyboard. The screen cover could be replaced by a new, perhapsbigger cover which had an integral keyboard in it, making the Newton into aclamshell unit.I was insane enough to open the back of the Newton, but not enough toremove the circuit board itself to see what is underneath. However, Ibelieve that there is not very much underneath. Most of the space is takenup by the PC slots, and of course the screen.The clock crystal on the board is marked 3.686R7A.The CPU of the Newton is of course the DIGITAL StrongARM chip. It is datedA9702 and marked SA-110S DC1035S JD0726.There are four chips from Cirrus Logic, including the largest one on theboard, marked CL-PS7010-QC-B 73786-699BF 9649 J. Two are markedCL-PS7030-VC-A 9647 J and the last is marked CL-PS7020-VC-A 9624 J.Two other chips from Sharp I assume are (DRAM?) memory, markedLH28F016SUT-10. Two more chips I assume are (flash?) memory have amanufacturer symbol I don't recognize and are marked 51W4260CLTT7.Other glue chips include: LTC1323CG; S19712DY T618CB; V573; 2302; 2401; andMAX1771.Putting the unit back together is easy. First position the plastic thingcovering the hinge slot, and the one covering the infrared port. Thencarefully position the cover and press it on. The latches snap into placefairly easily. Set the hinge side of the cover in place first, then hingeit down, being careful with the top edge and making sure the infrared coveris ok. Then the bottom and PC card edges. Make sure all the latches aresecure. Replace the four screws. Insert the battery. Say a little prayerand turn it on. If you have been lucky, the Newton will then start up withits initial setup procedure. Restore the Newton data and you are all set!I hope you enjoyed this tour. Permission is granted to redistribute thisarticle provided it is kept intact.Mike O'ConnorLeptonic Systems Inc.lepton@panix.comREPLY:From: lepton@panix.com (Mike O'Connor)Newsgroups: comp.sys.newton.miscSubject: Re: Inside the Newton MP2000 - A TourDate: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 21:21:18 -0400A techie-type person told me a little more about the circuits in the unit:> At the center of the PC side of the circuit board is the super capacitor.The capacitor will last for many minutes, and that it is probably a 1Fsize, not 0.1F. That's super!> There is also an empty connector toward the top of the board. This tiny> 32-pin connector is for an internal modem.The 32-pin connector has all the serial and general purpose ports, powerand grounds on it. Sounds like you can connect almost anything to it...> There are four chips from Cirrus Logic, including the largest one on the> board, marked CL-PS7010-QC-B 73786-699BF 9649 J. Two are marked> CL-PS7030-VC-A 9647 J and the last is marked CL-PS7020-VC-A 9624 J.The two identical chips are the PC card controllers. Another other is theserial interface chip that handles the modem, keyboard, IR and generalpurpose ports.> Two other chips from Sharp I assume are (DRAM?) memory, marked> LH28F016SUT-10. Two more chips I assume are (flash?) memory have a> manufacturer symbol I don't recognize and are marked 51W4260CLTT7.Seems I had this backward, the 28F016 chips are 4M flash memory. The 4260chips are 1M DRAM, 256K x 16. I didn't notice the extra pads under the DRAMchips. I wonder what would happen if I unsoldered the 1M DRAM chips and,using the unused pads, soldered in some Hitachi HM51W16160 or MotorolaMCM516165BV 1M x 16 DRAM chips? That would be four times as big...> LTC1323CGThis is the AppleTalk chip.> MAX1771This is the voltage converter chip for the backlight.