Enabling the "Disabled" Card Interfaces?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Has anyone else noticed how often different versions of what are essentially identical products often differ only in what connections are available on the card? Take for example the GeForce 2 MX... some cards include a TV-Out, others don't. Often, the traces that go to the missing connector are still on the board, only the plug/socket is missing. Has anyone ever tried adding these ports 'after market'? If so, what kind of success rate could one expect, adding something like an MPEG-2 audio connector to their TV tuner, or a DVI port to their Prophet?" An interesting thought, but is soldering on the missing connecter all you need for that extra functionality? Wouldn't firmware changes also be required?

OT

[cthugha]

Wouldn't surprise me if a missing plug was all you did need. I remember buying a PC with a half-gig HD; they must have been out of half-gig drives that day, so they just gave us a 1-gig drive partitioned down to half a gig.

Soldiering an S/PDIF port to your Ensoniq 1371

[DarkToast]

Here you go.

S/PDIF for AudioPCI [www.uta.fi]

GForce Cards

[DaRkJaGuaR]

A friend has soldered a S-Video outonto his GForce2GTS 64Mb version and used the firmware off my Leadtek card,(same type) and it worked perfectly but i can't remember which brand his card was. I have seen outside boxs you can plug inbertween cards and moniters that offer other video-ou modes too.

Not always possible

[clark625]

In general, simply soldiering the new jacks onto the board won't work. The actual circuit board is common to all revisions and features simply to reduce cost. Each "original" board costs far more, but additional boards are relatively cheap. This is why you see the leads and sometimes even empty sockets.

Even if you do soldier on new jacks, you may also have to soldier on surface-mount resistors, capacitors, etc, to get it to work. And there's still no guarantee. It's quite possible that particular chips are missing (NTSC generator for video out, etc), or even that the major chips are completely different from the more expensive version.

If you're really set on doing this, find a way to compare the cheaper and more expensive versions of the card. If the chip numbers are identical, and there doesn't seem to be any other major differences, then you're probably able to get the features working. And as always, be careful when soldiering onto a PCB--keep animals and small children away.

Virgin Webplayer

[knisa]

A lot of us who have Virgin Webplayers have experimented with this type of thing. There are lots of connectors on board that are missing, but the solder pads are there for. Thus far its been mixed success.

For example, there are chips missing to make a proper serial port out of the missing header. Same situation with VGA, but we were able to get around that. However, I've heard of people successfully adding a floppy drive connector, a keyboard connector (a pin needed to be cut on one of the ICs to make it work), etc. Your success will vary from board to board.

I think this was already said, but if you have a board that has the features you want to compare to the board with the missing features, you'll be able to figure out what's missing.

this is very common

[Phork]

this is a very common tactict in the electronics industry, because it costs less to fab more of the expensive board, than fab 2 seperaate boards.
A few years back some company released several printers, the only difference between the printers was the model number printed on the front, and the drivers in the box, you could download the better driver off of their website and you had the better printer.
The USA version of many nokia cellphones dont have IR ports, while the EU models do, the difference is simply a plug in module, and the firmware.
There was a ahrddrive a few years back(can't remember who made it) that you could open and remove one piece, and get 20% more space.
I have 2 dell towers that i use as servers, one has on board ethernet, the other one doesnt, but the one that doesnt has the place to solder on the jack, has the controler chip, and appears to have a jumper to turn it on.
I have heard this is also common with kitchen appliances.

Re:this is very common

[h2odragon]

I have an emerson TV/VCR combo that differs from its more expensive brother model (the one with OUT as well as IN jacks) only in having an extra bit of plastic on the molded outer case, to cover the jacks...

I like model upgrades that happen with a pair of pliers, I do; if only emerson didn't suck so very much...

Promise hard drive RAID enabler

[RGRistroph]

The one that had me fascinated for a while was the hack of soldering on a resistor and re-burning a BIOS to turn an ordinary Promise 66 harddrive controller into the RAID controller. Here's a link:

http://www.overclockin.com/reviews/PromiseUltra66/ [overclockin.com]

Hardware manufacturers often just manufacture the most featureful version of their product, and then sell purposefully damaged versions for lower prices. It's a kind of irritating practice, especially if you realize that they are using your money to damage the product they giving you. The canonical example of this is Intel; sometimes they actually damage the cheaper chips (remember back when Intel was burning out the math co-processor on one of their chips?) and other times they just mark it as having a lower clock rate. The situation arises from the fact that they can actually manufacture the device for much much less than they sell it for, so it makes sense to them to damage some allow them to optimize the amount of money they suck out of each part of each segment of the market.

And people try to get around those attempts to divide up the market, of course. If Intel can make money selling a $200 chip to me, why can't they sell it to hard-core gamers for $200 when it even costs the same amount ? I like the idea of a commodity type market, in which you cannot differentiate between any customers, one dollar is as good as another. But the high-tech industry has always dabbled in that type of artificial market stratification. Think of the way vendors dealing with items sold only to companies -- such as SGI's big servers, some software packages such as commercial Lisps and business suites, etc. Those guys often quote a special price for each customer, and want to know financial details on your company before they quote you a price, so that they can be sure to charge as much as you are willing to pay.

In their defense, one can say that this practice developed in the high-tech industry because there is a huge research cost and the actual manufacturing cost per item is a small percentage of the item's cost. The drug industry also has this feature and similar price disparities between artificial segments of the market (the companies sell the same drug for different prices to different insurance companies and in different countries). Of course the software area is the place where their is zero cost per copy and all the cost is development.

Television related, too...

[AtariDatacenter]

You could say that the TiVo falls into this category. Buy a 15 hour cheap model, and with a little effort, you can add a much larger second hard drive to it. But to be fair, this isn't quite the same, since the high cost component (the hard drive) isn't there.

I've taken apart a few game controllers by companies which sell an intelligent and a dumbed-down version. It seemed that all that was missing was the actual controls -- all the PCB traces were there.

My RCA television seems to be a case of this as well. There's some minor circuitry missing where the svideo in connector should be. If I had a better understanding of electronics, I could probably just wire one in.

And I wouldn't be surprised in a monitor's bios was the only thing that seperated some high resolution and lower capability models.

Quite a common way to cut costs. Its great when the Internet connected consumer finds a way around it, and publicises it. :)

It could be possible...

[cr0sh]

Although you may have to add extra chip(s) - polish up those SMT soldering skillz...

On a project I help out with, hacking the Acer NT-150 (see above link), on the majority of our boxes we had what appeared to be pads for a serial port, and we could plainly see empty pads for the serial driver IC - problem was we didn't know what IC.

A few people started doing tracing and such, and thought it was a Maxim part - since they did the free-sample thing on the part, one individual who had experience with SMT rework got what he thought was the right part, soldered it in - and it didn't work.

Soon thereafter another individual posted on our mailing list that he thought he had an NT-150, and had hooked up a serial mouse and a NIC - which we thought was absurd, since the thing didn't have a serial port that we knew of - he posted pictures of his box (a USWest Webvision box or something), and sure enough, he had a serial port. We had him post the part number for the driver IC, and it was a Maxim part, but it wasn't the one our other guy used. He ordered that part - _unsoldered_ the wrong one, and re-soldered the right one in, and "voila", free serial port to add a mouse, or anything else.

In the course of doing that, we have a few tutorials/notes on doing SMT rework with a low-wattage (15 watt) soldering iron, and plenty of patience, if you need to do such things.

Follow the traces back from where the connector should go - see if there are any breaks where resistors, caps, transistors and such might go. Sometimes they mount these, but not the connector (in our case, we had pull-up resistors already mounted next to the serial driver pads, just no chip). Other times, they don't. The other thing to keep in mind is whether the board is dual trace PCB, or multi-layer - if it is multi-layer, and the connector is soldered through the hole, it might actually connect with a middle layer as well (a layer you can't see). I don't know how you would connect with such a middle layer, except maybe to tin the connector, insert, and solder, and the reheat would melt it.

The key to most homebrew SMT rework is patience, and a steady hand (very steady). There is also a certain type solder you need to use, not 60/40 - it is a special solder meant for SMT work, and is a bit more expensive than the regular stuff. Also, apply heat very sparingly, to avoid lifting pads (which is VERY easy to do in SMT rework, from what I understand). If you are really intent on attempting this, I would go out and get some junk boards (drive controller boards from old hard drives are good for practice, to get a feel for working in a tight area, old ethernet cards is you want to practice for more space, and old sound cards sometimes have lower pin count SMT ICs to practice on) and practice removing and replacing components first, to get the hang of it.

Good luck!

Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

Re:SMT Rework.

[Technician]

Usualy there is no attempt to save the chip being removed. To keep from lifting traces, cut all the pins at the chip. Then rumove the pins by desoldering them one at a time. Many times rework is done on a hotplate. This is so a small wattage iron with the narrow tip can raise the temprature of a pin connected to a large ground plane enough to melt the solder without being too hot for the isolated pads.

Not unheard of

[bluGill]

Back in the '60s (?, maybe 70s) IBM had a mainframe printer that could to 50 or 100 (units, but I can't remember if it was cps or pages or whatever) the only difference was where a belt was set, and you could buy an upgrade which amounted to a tech coming out and changing the belt.

In that case, the faster version was running right on the edge of what the pritner could do, and so you paid extra for the upgrade because IBM has to deal with a lot more warrentie work on the faster model.