Disassembled

So Megan's tablet, (obtained in the same order as Ashley's) had problems with the WIFI... It started out working ok, but then started dropping 'net connection. Then she dropped the tablet onto Asphalt. The screen was undamaged, but something was rattling around inside. She asked me to look into it.

I found a neat video on youtube showing how to open one of these things up. Basically there are 4 screws in the corners, and a glossy sticker that covers the whole screen, including the heads of the screws. I used a thin blade to pry up each corner, and unscrewed the screws. (One of them had been busted loose on impact.)

There were some plastic clips along the outside edges too. Eventually I could lay it face down and gently lift off the back.

The hot-glue holding the battery down had failed on impact, and the battery had knocked a bunch of connectors askew. (Megan had shaken the device at one point to determine if something was really loose in there.)

The Ralink wifi card looks like it did not make good contact with the metal plate protecting the LCD in the first place, so it was probably overheating a bit even before the machine was dropped. I really don't like heat-sinking against the LCD, so I'm going to add some ventilation to the rear of the case, and put a new heat-sink on the wifi that way.

Anyway, I took some pictures while I was working on it. The tablet looks like this:

The motherboard has room for a bigger battery.

I do wish they'd used a plug to attach the battery though. Soldering to the terminals looks icky:

The battery was just hot-glued down, so it'll be easy to re-attach.

Other interesting components are that the CPU was on a board socketed using what looks like the same connector as DDR2.

The motherboard was neatly labelled M009S_V9 20110513 in the lower left corner.

This is the wifi card. It has a RAlink chip on it, I think it is an RT3070...

I've talked to megan, and I'm going to put some ventilation in the back of the case, and add a heatsink to the chip itself. I really don't like to have the WIFI bleeding heat into the LCD.