N900 Hardware Hacking

This page outlines what is known about the hardware of the n900, and possible modifications or additions to it.

Much of the information on this page may be incorrect, and may cause damage to your n900 if you attempt any of it.

Hacks

 * Case
 * Camera
 * Wifi
 * Bluetooth
 * Battery
 * Audio
 * Video

Compass
The HMC5843 compass from honeywell seems as if it would be a simple addition, if it could be wired onto a I2C bus..

There is also miniSD AMI603SD 6 degree sensor available, if it is possible to wire that to microSD slot. The same manufacturer is also providing small magnetic sensors AMI304 to i2c bus with DIP8 so it would be easier to solder with capasitors but there is not much room inside n900.

I2C bus can have chained up to 112 slave devices. Only problem is to get those pins available maybe de-soldering some component first... also one free GPIO/interrupt line would be good thing to have.

Gyroscope
The forthcoming invensense itg3200 is a gyroscope chip that could similarly be connected to a I2C bus.

UART to I2C bridge
There is also available some bridge chips UARTtoI2C that can be used over UART. Most likely UART pins can be found in debug ports.

Debug ports
Under the battery are several groups of test pad connectors. With the camera on the left, and the battery removed. These are numbered for the purposes of this page clockwise, with pad 1 of a connector at its top left.

Probable connections are anything that will enable full tests and bootstrap of of the phone without a case.

Obvious candidates are JTAG for flashing any bootloader, and USB for flashing the device. Serial ports, I2C, SPI are also possible.


 * J1 - 2 pad connector to the middle left above the battery connector.
 * J2 14 pad connector in two parts.
 * (a) - 6 pad connector.
 * (b) - 8 pad connector
 * J3 - 7 pads.
 * J4 - 7 pads.

=Modifications=

USB
The USB on the n900 is done through the isp1707 chip.

=Resources= N900 Service Manual - Level 1&2: MediaFire or Maemoworld

N900 Service Manual - Level 3&4: Torrent, rghost or RapidShare

A teardown with some pics from georgia, and a video of reassembly.

Dissasembly video from tehkseven.

=Vendors= Tessco has a variety of n900 parts. Note that Tessco sells Nokia parts only to Authorized Service Centers. (they currently do not however have stopped listing parts for nokia phones.)