Pod 3 revision E issues

[craigcabrey]

Hi,

Do you know which revision of the Pod 3 you have? I've pulled apart a Pod 3 but the daughterboard does not carry a microSD card. Do you have any pictures?

This is what I see. I'm wondering if they did a revision to remove the SD card.

[bobobo1618]

Damn, looks like they have a revision with a completely different daughterboard and it looks like they made this one themselves. Is there no SD card on it at all? Nothing on the back of the daughterboard for example?

I've added some info on my board to the readme to hopefully avoid anyone else running into the same problem.

Don't suppose you can share a photo of the back of the daughterboard as well? I'm curious what kind of processor they're using but the chip on this side is a Mediatek MT7668 which is just a wifi/bluetooth chip. If there's no processor on the other side, this board might just only act as a network adapter for the STM32 chips on the larger circuit board, so there wouldn't really be a way to hack it because there'd be nothing to hack.

The only workaround I can think of is to buy the module used on my revision, flash it and install it. Since you wouldn't be able to bootstrap it with the existing Eight Sleep hardware, you'd have to get a dev kit though and that's expensive and I can't guarantee that it'd work.

Something I hope to get to eventually is figuring out the interface the daughterboard uses to communicate with the rest of the hardware. If I can do that, it should theoretically be possible to make an open-source version of the daughterboard hardware and software.

[hongkongkiwi]

Yea, there may be a flash chip on there you can pull the firmware from. Be great to have a picture of the backside of that board..... @craigcabrey ?

Also, a non-blurry photo would be great!

[craigcabrey]

Sorry for the delay, here's the backside (hopefully not too blurry). I didn't see any kind of SPI chip to clip onto. It really seems like it's a fully custom daughterboard.

[craigcabrey]

That said, there are TX/RX pads, though I'm not sure if they are UART or something else. Maybe if somebody is in the ATX area we could collaborate lol

[andrew-kennedy]

@craigcabrey do you know what pod revision shows up in the app for you? I'd like to know if I have a compatible pod 3 without opening it up, if possible. My hub version is 20500-0003-F08-******** (redacted in case the full ID exposes anything private).

[nota-nota-nota]

@bobobo1618 is the SD card supposed to be ON the pop-up daughter board? Or under it?

For my board, the SD card is on the main board. In a slot that was hidden under the daughter board (no sd card on the daughter board).

My main control board is the same as same as the original guide "Control Board 230-0030 Rev-10.7-PRD"

@craigcabrey - There is an unpopulated SD card slot on your main board near the same location of the slot on my board. (it isn't exactly the same. Your SD slot is closer to the screw than mine is). Unlikely, but connecting an SD card might work...

What revision of the main board do you have?

[misslisa62tx]

I'm fairly certain this is rev 3 of the control board, same version I have, where yours is version 2. (white sticker in the upper left)

Turs out there are a bunch of missing components for the SD card, not just the slot. (at least on mine, not sure about his)

What he didn't show clearly on the daughter board is the Kingston 32GB EMMC flash chip.

I'm fairly certain that's where the code will be now. I don't see any other memory chips on either board. Unfortunately, I believe it would have to be desoldered in order to read/write it.

[misslisa62tx]

Oh, I meant to say. They've added another set of jumper pads on the main control board in J7. My guess is that is now the factory programming port. I might trace that out and see if I can prove that.

[timwu]

Out of curiosity, can we get the manufacturing dates of the different Pod 3s in question? Might help to discern which Pod 3's are usable before tearing them open.