The Retro Society of Reverse Engineering and Taking Things Apart Homepage

Quite some time ago, I stumbled across a web site of some guys calling themselves the American Society of Reverse Engineering. Unfortunately they seem to have gone away. So, this page chronicles the things that I have reverse engineered, sometimes for fun, sometimes to fix it, and sometimes to redesign it so that it would actually work.

• 2001-12-21: Icom BP-7 (Battery pack for the IC2 range, 13.2V, 700mAh)

  I found a source for brand new BP-7 and BP-8 batteries at a good price. But... the one I received didn't work right. So of course, out came the screwdriver...

  Schematic
  The battery pack contains a small relay that reconfigures the cells as two banks of 6 cells to charge them. With the charger disconnected the configuration is one bank of 11 cells. So what happens to the missing cell? Well, one cell is shared by both banks. Why? well, an additional cell would have brought the voltage up to 14.4V and the IC2 was designed for < 13.8V. I would have used two banks of 5 cells each, for 12.0V, but the BP-7 was designed for maximum performance, thence this trick.

  I found that the relay centre contact pin was broken, fortunately this type of relay has two pins connected together and I just soldered a wire from the other pin.

  I also found that the "C" contact on the top of the battery case was shorting to the positive voltage when the battery is on the radio, so I rewired things so that the "C" contact is connected to the positive output.

   

• 2002-02-14: Pioneer DV-525 DVD player.

  I bought the service manual from Dmitri at www.electronicsrepair.net -- best $10 I've spent in a while. The service manual contains the complete schematic diagram and parts list.

  Nifty things I have learnt:

  • There is only one adjustment, and that is to set the master clock to 16.934400 MHz +- 80Hz. The test point is marked "16M" and is located close to the centre of the main PCB (which is a 4 layer board, BTW).
  • The CPU is a PD3410A, which is Pioneer labelled, so I guess I'll be SOL trying to find out more about it. The processor board has a serial port (5V TTL, RxD, TxD, CTS, DTR) which is probably used to configure the player. The CTS line enables +12V (for programming) to the flash when pulled low.
  • The MPEG decoder is a Fujitsu MB86373. I would assume this is where the Macrovision gets generated but I haven't been able to find a data sheet for this part either.
  • The FLASH chip is "VYW1656". This is a 16 bit wide FLASH chip with 20 address lines (i.e. 1M x 16) but only A0 to A17 are used, giving an effective size of 256K x 16. Package is 48 pin TSOP. The pinout for this chip is the same as AMD 29LV400B but of course the device ID and internal arrangement (boot blocks and the like) may differ. The AMD part doesn't need 12V to program so it's definitely not equivalent.

   

• 2002-02-18: Creative Dxr2 DVD decoder card

  I bought this card from Cape Ads for R350. This included the CDROM with the DVD player application, but not the disk with the driver. Drivers are available from creative though.

  Eric Smith has hardware information on this card.

  As far as I can seem you need the following stuff to make the card work (with Creative Labs Encore 12x PC-DVD drive)

  • 0.44 Region-free driver for your DVD drive (I have a 1241E, I downloaded 1241e0patched44.zip and it worked)
  • DriveInfo1.1 to verify that the patch took (Avaliable from the above site).
  • Drivers for Dxr2 ( dvdewup.exe is said to work for Win95, Win98 and WinNT) (This page looks crap with Nutscrape 4.5, but if you scroll to the bottom you'll find the link).
  • region.exe, drive.exe, and drive2.exe. I'm still playing with these.

   

• 2004-01-21: Bosch Alternator Regulator

  This regulator comes off a small Bosch alternator from a 1600 VW Fox (Golf / Rabbit).

  Schematic and description.

2008-03-26: Bosch 0 227 100 142 / VW 191 905 351 A / TP-100 VW TCI module

The watercooled VWs (Golf / Fox / etc) use a "TCI" ignition control module, with a Hall Effect sensor in the distributor body, and a conventional-looking ignition coil. I received an email from Carlo W, who had managed to make this module work with conventional points on his V8 Land Rover, so I decided to investigate (I have a complete distributor / coil / TCI / loom lying around from a 1600 Fox we stripped). I broke the top off the TCI module and partially traced the schematic (it's a thick film hybrid module covered in a transparent sticky gel [429k picture]). It basically consists of what looks like a zener based voltage regulator for the Hall Effect sensor, a chip which does all the clever stuff, and a driver transistor for the coil. So yes, feeding a pulse similar to that coming from the Hall Effect sender into pin 6 will work. Now the question : Is the signal from a standard set of mechanical points close enough to that from the Hall Effect sensor? Carlo W said that his setup was giving too high a voltage (he claims a 5cm (that's 2&) spark), leading to arcing all over the place. He suspects this is because of the dwell time of the mechanical points. Question-du-jour : does the Hall Effect sender pulse duration vary with engine speed, like points, or is it a fixed-time pulse? If fixed-time, one should be able to build something with a 555 to make everything happy. How to test a Hall sensor (google translate is your friend) http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/555/555.html http://www.circuitdb.com/circuits/id/107 http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=1994008135&IA=WO1994008135&DISPLAY=DESC http://www.molla.org/DIY-CDI/SC-DIY-CDI-article-hires.pdf