My iPod Nano broke…

I’m not exactly sure, but I suspect the damage happened when I was prying it open with a metal screwdriver.

I only wanted to see what was inside. I was curious and bored. I blame Apple – they make these things so darn difficult to open. I mean honestly – they are designed to be disposable, and that isn’t cool. If the battery goes soft, you are expected to throw it out. If the headphone jack gets loose, you’re expected to throw it out.

I’m not just ticked about being expected to toss out a $175-ish product, but the wastefullness is pretty eco-harsh. Not that I’m helping, by killing it with curiosity. But come on, is it that horrendous to throw a couple screws on the back, instead of sealing it up with self-destructing metal click tabs.

So there’s this new game that just came out for the DS, called Pokemon. I don’t really get it. There’s these wild semi-magical beasties that you catch, squish them down into little balls, then release them now and then and force them to fight each other for entertainment and money.

Anyhow, it came with a pedometer that connects wirelessly to the game card, and I wanted to know how it worked.

Before I got out the magic screwdrivers and scalpel, I did play with it for a bit. I got a Totodile, and I named him Bungee. He defeated a bunch of other wild creatures. He can scratch and squirt water and glare menacingly.

But then I got bored and started prying things apart…

The cartridge casing looks black, but it’s transparent – you can shine light through it. The big chip is the ROM, it’s 1Gb (128MB). The smaller chip above that is a flash ram for the game saves, it’s 4Mb (512kB). At the top is the IR transceiver bit, below that is an oscillator. The chip on the right is some kind of microprocessor.

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Can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something ‘up’ with my iPod Shuffle…

As I usually spend New Years alone, it has become a bit of a tradition for me to buy myself a new toy that I can disassemble on the 31st of December. In the past, it has frequently been something in the Amateur Radio genre, but this year I opted to do a Nintendo DSi.

I’m not much of a gamer, and I pretty much suck at almost all video games. I’ve had a DS for a while but the only game I was really happy with was the crossword game. Then I gave my DS to my mum so she could play that brain age thing. Anyhow, so I decided to get the DSi so I could take it apart. I like electronic gizmos. I like taking them apart. I like hacking them or breaking them or just finding out how they work.

The DSi has been around for a while now – feels like a year or so. But there’s very, very little info out there about hacking it. Really there’s just one site that has no news, just aggregates info from gaming sites. I don’t want cheat codes or that sort of thing, I want to mess with the hardware. It’s got 256MB of Flash storage, 16MB of RAM, and a 32-bit ARM processor at 133MHz. With the built-in WiFi and dual screens and SDHC expansionality, there’s more than enough oomph in there to run Linux, among other things… (Remember the Zipit?)

There’s no info that I could find about the software – is the DSi operating system a complete customized Nintendo thing? Or maybe the GUI is Nintendo but there’s something else under the hood? The CPU is supposedly custom made for Nintendo so that might preclude it doing other things…

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…so I wouldn’t have to – the 2nd Generation iPod Shuffle Take-Apart.

I always gotta see the insides of stuff, and with stuff getting smaller and smaller, and not having obvious doors or openings, it makes it harder and harder to get inside stuff. At least, without breaking it.

So when someone else has figured out how to get inside, that’s good. And when they’ve posted a pictorial of the process, that’s even better. So for something that I really like and don’t want to have to destroy to get it open, it’s good, now I can just go look at the pictures and my compulsion to get inside and see how it works, is satisfied.

2nd Gen iPod Shuffle Take-Apart Guide