insideGadgets

Today we’ll be looking at the Belkin F7D4501 ScreenCast TV Adapter which allows you to transmit your laptop’s screen to your TV, the downside is it only supports laptops that have Intel’s WiDi. I don’t have a laptop that supports this, so only thing we can do is take it apart!

4 screws later and we’re in.

We have shielding on the front and back, 2 antennas and it appears there is a USB wireless dongle that’s plugged in which connects to the board – not something I was expecting to see. I plugged in the USB dongle to my computer and seems to be detected as a 802.11n WLAN.

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Today we’ll be looking an Alcatel Lucent 9361 Home Cell V2 which is used as a small base station to provide your mobile phone with better reception.

A few notches later and we’re in, no screws needed to be removed but it was a bit of a pain to get in.

When you pick up the board it’s a bit heavy compared to other PCBs and straight up we can see 2 metal covers which is what you’d see in mobile phones. There is also a plastic cover as well which is a little strange. On the back of the board we can see that we have some metal blocks and an unpopulated section at the top left, maybe for a micro SD card slot?

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Just a quick teardown today, we’ll be looking at the Tenda 8 Port Fast Ethernet Switch – I’ve never heard of this manufacturer before.

2 screws later and we’re in.

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We’ll be looking at the Ericsson HM410dp ADSL2+ Service Gateway. I didn’t know that Ericsson made any routers at all, this one was manufactured in 2006.

Four screws and 2 notches later we’re in.

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Just a quick teardown today – we’ll be looking at a Soniq QV320PH 32″ Plasma TV which has faulty audio – no sound, it seems to turn on and display images just fine. I opened this TV to see if I could repair it and in doing so I didn’t end up taking close ups of the chips.

After a lot of screws we’re in.

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Another quick teardown, this time we open up an Energizer AA/AAA/9V battery charger.

3 screws later and we’re in. At first it looks like a single layer board but on the back there’s a double sided board.

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I thought I’d do another quick teardown, this time of a photo keyring we had lying around for a while.

Four screws later and we’re in.

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Today we’ll be looking at the Netgear DG814 DSL Modem Internet Gateway, it looks to be the first version released which is why it looks so large compared to other routers I have looked at.

Four screws later and we’re in.

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I thought I’d do a quick teardown on a generic 4GB USB thumbdrive that stopped working, I was given this drive to be destroyed.

When inserting the thumbdrive it would recognise it however it would ask to insert a disk when clicking on the volume, so let’s open it up.

It was very easy to open up and upon first glance the build quality doesn’t seem too great but then again it’s a generic USB drive. We can see that it seems PCB wasn’t exactly made for the case which is why they have the glue to hold it in place.

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Today we’ll be looking at the Cyberguard Snapgear SME530 VPN Firewall Appliance which is used between modems/routers and the network, kind of like a UTM. Cyberguard were bought out by McAfee and then discontinued.

Two screws later and we’re in. If you look near the bottom right, you’ll see a battery probably for the RTC. Interestingly enough the Netgear UTM which I took apart also had one too but routers/modems don’t have them, I guess these kind of appliances where logs are everything you don’t want to re-set the date/time when they power down or reset .

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