Prototype smart card chips in DIL-40 case have arrived
Finally, the first samples of the smart card chip (for the Osmocom
CardOS project) have arrived. As opposed to the final smart cards,
this one has been packaged in a DIL case instead of the usual thin
credit-card sized plastic. The reason for this is quite simple: This
way lots of I/O pins for debugging as well as JTAG can be accessible
during COS development.
Here you can see the first incarnation of a veroboard connected to an
adapter pcb inside an Omnikey smart card reader:
After confirming it worked, I soldered the wires directly to the adapter
PCB, as can be seen here:
There is already a real PCB design that is currently
manufactured, i.e. in a week or so there will be a picture of a clean,
professionally-produced/etched PCB with all of the prototype pins
exported.
In terms of the COS, I haven't done much more work than compared to the
last posting, mainly due to a large number of other projects. But we
will get there...
Name that UART: April 2012
It's sort of a cheap knock-off idea stolen from the Name that
Ware on bunnies
blog: I'm going to post one picture every month about a UART that
I found on embedded hardware. Unfortunately I don't have much to offer
in terms of a reward for whoever finds the true solution ;)
In any case, every month there are devices that I'm looking into either
out of my own interest, or because the work at gpl-violations.org
requires it. In most of them, you can find a UART to get to the u-boot
/ Linux serial console.
So here is the device that I just took apart earlier today:
The location of the UART pads was obvious, after looking at the PCB for
a very short time. The entire unpopulated U1 footprint appeared
suspiciously like a UART level shifter for true RS232 voltage levels:
- You can see two signals going directly to a small
unpopualted3-pin
header
- There are two other signals coming from somewhere under the main SoC
- There are capacitors (C440, C441) directly connected to the U1 for the charge pump
