Now I know that doesn't interest most of you, but I have always been interested in how businesses work and I considered it a great opportunity to learn how businesses design gadgets, and also to influence a mass-market product to hopefully make it better and more successful.
I waited in earnest for my 442 to arrive, and what else could I do as soon as I got it but tear it apart? Especially since now I have so much time on my hands
But that's not the end of it. No, sir. The aluminum casing proves very well-attached to the plastic top and bottom panels.
Of course, every problem has a solution, and with the proper application of the right tools (along with a gentle stabbing/twisting motion, and making some sweet songlike cooing noises to coax the casing into a state of relaxful bliss), the aluminum panels can be freed.
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As I pry the two halves apart, you can see a little cable going from the mainboard to the keys on the front of the unit. It's secured with a simple brown removable clip so we can set the front cover aside. Next to that is the very thin (and fragile) LCD screen and less fragile backlight. They're secured together with the flat orange circuit board / cable thingy and connected to the mainboard with a clip like before. They remove fairly easily.
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Now see if you can follow this. The display connector is the wide one. The button connector is the skinny one, on the right. So what's this mystery third connector? When I opened up the unit, it wasn't connected to anything. What could it be? A serial port? JTAG connector? Secret accessory jack? Undocumented DRM "feature" connector? Tacos? Maybe we'll never know.
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Here's the mainboard taken out and made photos of. You might also enjoy the high-resolution 5-mexipickle 1-megabyte versions of these images, which you might be able to find links to if you look here or here. As you can see the Neuros 442 sports a powerful dual-core Texas Instruments DM270 CPU, along with 128MB of RAM and something like 8 megabytes of flash for the firmware. If you look on the upper-left side of the first picture you'll see a set of solder pads for another connector that doesn't go anywhere, another mystery.
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Moving along, the motherboard is secured by six small philips-head screws.Removing those and the hard drive connector reveals the hard drive, a Seagate 4200 40gb OEM drive. This is where one would add a bigger hard drive or replace with a CF-to-IDE adapter or something.
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And as you all know, it's important to put everything together and turn it on before putting it back in the case, to make sure you didn't bust anything with your gentle stabbing motions.
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And there you have it. The Neuros 442 in all of its hot naked disassembled glory. According to Neuros, the Linux-running version of the 442 (the Neuros 122) will look essentially the same but have a different processor (the TI DM320) and have more features such as optical/digital audio, USB host functionality, a serial console, and software things like application extensibility and games.
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