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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- Teardown of the Panasonic CF-U1 Windows 7 based Toughbook
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Datasheets:
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I ran the pre-sales Toughbook engineering team for Panasonic in the US when that came out. The glass was a chemically-hardened item and wasn't a source of failure. Generally, screen failures were way down on the list of what broke. The U1 had a total of 6 antennas (Bluetooth, 2 x WiFi, 2 x Cellular, GPS). There were some accessory options that would have gone where the initial cover went.
The two WWAN antennas are not for WiFi, but for the Ericsson mobile 3G module. That explains the two different sizes.
Yep, wifi is usually labeled as WLAN on laptops.
Yea, WWAN = Wireless Wide Area Network
I'm familiar with Panasonic's Toughbook lineup and let me tell you - they follow the same design in all their products. It's cool seeing the oddly familiar guts of a CFU1, but it's really interesting seeing a heavily used one.
Panasonic improves on the design with every revision after they see what you see here Dave. It's some top-tier hardware alright and when the new stuff comes out businesses just auction the old on the cheap! I say grab it while you can and frankenstein what works! Eventually you end up with a shelf of $4,000 computers that just need new HDDs and caddys! (sonsofbitches *NEVER* bother leaving the caddy in, they toss the whole thing for decom!!!)
Yes, and to buy the caddy on it's own is stupidly expensive!
It's Corning glass, which is pretty tough, but that thing looks like its been through a nuclear war. Would be interesting to find out the backstory of that ToughBook. That thing is beat to s***!
Haha. Yeah, now that you mention a nuclear war, this makes me think of a Pipboy from the game series Fallout. The Pipboy was a 1950's style futuristic arm-mounted personal computer, made to take anything and keep on ticking. The only thing this computer in the video is missing, is something to lock it onto your arm. (Well, okay, it's quite different in what it uses to do what it does. But all I'm saying, is that it has a strange resemblance to a Pipboy.)
The system engineering that goes into one of these is impressive, just think about it all those modules, with cables, antennas, LEDs, flat flex, everything fitting nicely over that chassy.. it's crazy.
Now put it back together!
if i took it apart i would power it up
Too late,the flat flex has already been torn. :-)
yep, he torn it
Random thought for next april's fools day: Do a teardown and use language/phrases/expressions like AvE
The first time I saw an AvE video I realised what it must be like for a non-Aussie to watch Dave :)
Keep ya dick in a vice!
And read off the plastic manufacturer's mark, and decode it like AvE. More obscure technical details! There have got to be some plastic composition aficionados out there...
That would be a boobie jizzler.
I just looked up AvE, he sounds normal to me
This PC would be a really skookum coocher.
Looks like a nice bit of kit for OBD diagnose in automotive services.
The Doom Guy tried to Play Doom on it and got angry...
Castellations. Learned a new word. :)
Impress your friends at dinner parties.
Hells yeah! My wife is tired of the word "periphery" -- lol
AHAHAHAHAHAHHA
apparently the device costed about 2000 us dollars
I had a Mk1 U1 once, never again.
I do love my CF-31 Mk3 though!
love the Doom and Crysis joke :)
Got one of these, without the barcode reader, and eBay find. Finding an SSD for it was impossible. Literally impossible. No-one seems to stock them. I ended up sacrificing the 3G WWAN board and putting a generic M-SATA to ZIF board in there and stuck a regular M-SATA SSD in there. Getting the cable to fit wasn't easy either. Great little machine though.
The Atom CPU is pushed pretty hard running Windows 7, but turning off all the non-essential features and removing the fancy eye-candy improves things somewhat.
I did try installing Linux on the thing, but there's quite a bit of proprietary hardware in there that doesn't play nicely, so I had to settle for Windows.
Just saw one up for ~£80 from Yankee land. Another £20 or so for delivery.
I am kind of tempted. Those backlit triggers on the side are very nice, not to mention all the fun that is to be had from the barcode scanner!
They might pitch the custom interface as a security through obscurity feature.
I've seen very similar sort of hand held Windows based computer with inbuilt bar-code scanner with the courier guy while delivering he scans and takes a digital signature.
Haha the first 5 seconds killed me. Totally beat up, cracked screen, then "TOUGHBOOK" hahaha oh really?
7:19 those are cell antennas. WWAN refers to Cell, WLAN refers to WIFI.
Dave: Glay = Gray, dat engrish
Ing-gur-ish!
lol
Intel used to bundle their low-power Atoms with really ancient, power-hungry chipsets, hence the rather odd difference in die size. I think competition from ARM convinced them to finally get their act together.
its soo good when you find something that makes you happy !
That thing you mentioned ~2:40 is an expansion connector probably for a camera. Newer ones let you throw a barcode reader on them (Trying to talk the warehouse managers into those. Whoever thought surfaces were a good idea didn't think about how breakable things are in an industrial environment.)
That H8S micro plays the role of the "keyboard controller" aka "embedded controller" aka "system management controller" (the latter in Apple-speak).
You could totally play Doom on this thing.
But yes, it doesn't have the oomph for serious gaming. The keyboard would certainly suck for the purpose.
USB hub and keyboard and mouse
Much more than Doom is possible. For example, it should run Half-Life 1 just fine.
I think it would even run Source based games (HL2, Portal, TF2, etc.) on it but the FPS would be like 2 maybe 3.
i owned two of these i bought from a sleazy tattoo artist in dallas texas - as well as many other toughbooks - and most of the screens were made in this way. and we could literally hold them and let people punch the screens without them breaking.that glass is VERY strong. like.. punch the screens like you would punch a person you didnt want getting back up. no breaks.
It could run doom easily. Even HP and TI calculators can be rooted to run doom. It ran on a 486CPU and even an old Iphone3 had several dozen times that CPU power. If you ever do a tear down of a force feedback joystick you will often find processors on them equal to mid 90's CPU's. The Microsoft Force Feedback Pro flight stick actually had a genuine Intel 486 inside and it's only job was off loading force feedback effects.
No mention of the blind and buried vias on the main board? That's not something you see too often, and helps explain the non-typical BGA pattern on the bottom of the board.
I love teardowns.
Beautiful tech
Dave, with intel stuff the s-spec is your friend. In this case the processor is marked SLB6P, it'll tell you precisely what kind of a processor it is.
glass is very rugged and only breaks on sharp impacts. unless you drop it screen first on a rock, the screen is perfectly acceptable and not flexible
I confirm I dropped one off a handrail 3 floors up and it landed on the corner and glass was fine it shut off but booted back up.
If they had used tempered glass it would have been highly resistant to frontal impact (only the edges of tempered glass are weak). However, the breakage pattern of this glass much more closely resembles untreated plate glass, so not sure what they actually used but it obviously did not survive its final test.
excellent teardown Dave. Thank you so much.
The H8S is probabily the EC (Embedded Controller), it's common on laptop PCs too
Check out the wacky trace routing near the processor and chipset (15:50 to 16:10 or so).
IP rating rates the dust/partial protection and moisture protection, The first number is the dust/partial protection and the max value is 6 and the second number is moisture protection with a max value of 8. So this device has max dust proofing but moisture protection is only water resistant against jets of water and not fully waterproof.
LOL... That's the 2nd "Last Action Hero" movie reference I've seen this week!
Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper... :D
The middle area on the back (2:31) which wasn't populated was for a different barcode reader (1D, so the zebra stripe type barcodes) where as this one appears to be optioned with a 2D scanner (it can read QR type codes as well as 1D codes).
Below the opening you can see an additional sticker cover where the optional 2MP camera and LED lights were fitted, this would have poked through the hole in the cover (seen at 2:37).
Hey Dave, what do you do with all the electronics stuff you've torn down; do you take it to a electronics recycling place or just chuck it in the bin?
If it's a scrap item then I usually keep interesting looking PCB's for, well, whatever, and ditch the rest.
Along the same line as your comment apropos the blue cable being marked on the PCB, you'll note that the two antenna connections on the WWAN module have black and white arrows, matching the cable colours.
Excellent teardown Dave. I see an interesting RC network 16:50 into the video. I've used similar networks for snubbing supply lines or filter equalization. In all cases, it usually indicates a tough problem, very much unplanned and unwelcome.
That glass is so strong and well mounted that other things around it will break before it does...
That connector for the hard drive most likely connects to a hard drive enclosure. In toughbooks, the hard drives are encased in a shockproof casing that has a heating element and a bunch of padding.
Sweet Teardown, thanks. I tried to buy a few of these for testing but my officers went for l14rugged
the WWAN antenna is for the 3g modem
Nice teardown Dave, I always wanted to see the insides of that little toughpad
Some nice parts in there. Some even worth salvaging, especially all that magnesium allow.
00:47 - Also served as an emergency 'tread' when one of the dump trucks on the site was stuck in mud! :)
that Chron-chip is a video encoder for S-video :)
Crysis has been around since late 2007 lol but the current one is Crysis 3. Used be to be the joke of the day because it took a monster of a machine to run it so it was years before systems got good enough for it to be old news. Awesome times those were ;)
The board that is in the middle of the white antenna cables is a switch to allow for using pass-thru to external antennas when docked. There SHOULD (if it's the same as my CF-19) be 2 antennas for WLAN and 2 for WWAN, Main and Aux. No BT on my toughbook, so no clue how the BT would be routed. WLAN=Wireless LAN (Wifi) WWAN=Wireless Wide Area Network (3G/4G ETC)
6:35 You, Sir, just made my day!
AZ91D magnesium is very common in mid to high end computing devices. I used to see this every day working on fujitsu, hp dell Toshiba etc
If that's anything like other ToughBooks, the stylus is actually a Wacom pressure sensitive model, similar to the Samsung Note series. Should work well for note taking.
The way all the cracks converge to one point looks like it had an unlucky drop and landed on a sharp rock or some other hard point. The company I work for provides rugged handhelds for meter reading. You should see how battered they get. Apparently some meter readers were using them as hammers to 'persuade' stubborn meter box doors to open...
Having glass may actually not be that bad of a component selection.
Glass is really hard and sturdy, its also can also absorbed tremendous amount of torque, more so than magnesium. If its just sufficiently hardend its actually very hard to break
Love good adhesion tape. :-) Great video!
I have used the big brother CF-19 (&18) convertible tough books for over 10 years and apart from the HDDs crashing on the older ones (they are all SSDs now) the main problem with them is you forget how fragile normal laptops are and accidentally pick them up by the screen with sand on your gloves or leave them in the back of the ute with the tool boxes and core trays ...
All the magnesium chassis, insulating tapes, modularity and level of engineering in such a tiny space reminds me of my old ThinkPads. They just don't build them like this anymore.
many are guessing that using glass was for the touch screen. Its a possible reason. But its also possible they anticipated use outdoors. Plastics generally yellow rather quickly if left out in the sun all day, every day. Like, within just a few months.
Other than Gorilla Glass, plastics scratch MUCH easier than glass too.
The glass is probably there to have a stronger surface on the screen so the LCD itself doesn't discolor (maybe even get damaged?) when pressing on it with the stylus
We don't mind if you use tweezers to touch the broken glass. I, for one, would rather not see dark red markers indicating "Do not touch! Sharp edge!"
What is that black poking stick Dave always uses? If it is similar than my fresh one I bought because Dave has one.. it is really interesting piece of EE equipment. It is handy for radio tuning, test it ;) PS. For clarification I measured a resistance as low as 100 ohms / centimeter of stick, the fiber might be carbon.
They need a glass because it's the only thin, transparent and importantly rigid surface for the touch to compress against for probably the old resistive tech
Dave, why dont you check the plastic casting marks?, then it's very easy to know exactly what kind of plastic we're dealing with, same as ther teardown with plastics involved
glass, for the capacitive thouch panel
If you look at the touch screen connector it has 4 pins which indicates a resistive touch screen so it couldn't be that :(
Luke Bennett but it is still glass because touch screen. Clearly they couldn't make it work with polycarbonate back plate. probably due to needed rigidity for the resistive system to work. specially through that thick front blast shield of polycarbonate.
hey dave love your videos
Very Interesting!
I have two of these, one running win 7 pro and one with xp with a whopping 2gb hdd.
I got them from my neighbor who worked on the U1 Experience app.
Why use glass: so you know when to buy another one.
That thing probably still worked, well, powered up & POSTed, given the lack of the SSD and all, takes a lot to kill a toughbook... :)
A good reason for the glass could be because capacitive touch screens work way better with glass then with platisc.
Nice piece.
let's say that I want to make a board in a flex tape. Who are the manufacturers that provide such service?
seeedstudio do flex pcbs I think.
Almost any PCB manufacturer does flex and semiflex.
The glass is most likely to prevent people from pressing to hard with the pen and damaging the LCD.
I would think the glass was their to prevent the touches on the touch screen from damaging the LCD. maybe plastic was allowing too much distortion of the screen.
One day he's going to turn it on before tearing it apart, and the world will end.
Wonder if it worked (even POSTed) after it broke... the motherboard looks well protected, and the only weak points look to be the screen and external IO ports.
that's plain ol plate glass. normal glass breaks into shards. tempered glass(safety glass) breaks into a crap load of small chunks. low iron glass which a lot of people call starfire glass is just very clear. non tempered low iron is probably what that pc is using.
Man that thing has had a hard life..
I think one antenna is for the 2.4Ghz and the other is for the 5Ghz bands.
Also I think there were several different versions of the toughbook. This might be the cheap version?
Doom, Crysis. Haha Dave you are such a geek. Next time just say Battlefield, and most gamer nerds will be happy :) Loved the teardown.
Though keep in mind that this was essentially a netbook in a very well built enclosure. So about $2000 of that price was for the enclosure as the base PC, standard 1-2GB RAM (max), WiFi and 3G modules along with hard drive or SSD were pretty typical of the Atom based netbooks that came out between 2010-2012 for about $300 a piece with Windows 7 (usually starter, with Pro a $100 upgrade option IIRC). So that is an expensive chassis unless you absolutely required such as many netbooks could survive pretty substantial falls as built as they weighed so little versus a typical laptop that the falls were often not that tough on them (especially with an SSD).
That's weird, leave it to UA-cam to attach my reply to an entirely different comment...no wonder I did not see my reply immediately afterwards!
Are you putting it all back together in the next video :) Br, Eeli
I've always wanted an ex army one of these.. You can get CF-53s on ebay for about $600
Maybe glass is more resiliant to the acidic rain?
That thing looks like it was run over by a forklift... or something equally as heavy... Also, the dock is probably a ram mount RAM-HOL-PAN4U or RAM-HOL-PAN4PU (powered).
I know the laptop style ones with the flip screen and chiclet keys were like $5K or $6K AUD back in the day.
They used glass because, if i have understood correctly, that's a *resistive* touchscreen and those use glass
Are you an Italian EEVblog rip off? haha
Haha, for real.
You can put a fingerscanner on the back where the cover is
You're going to have to do a bit of hoovering of your bench, there!
I'm still wondering if you can upload any video game console modding tutorials... some console modding videos are a little too questionable... So, as a reliable source, can you make some tutorials? That is if you want to...
Check out Ben Hecks stuff for modding.
Check out the shield pads on the pcb, if orange then contain more copper rather than gold.... emf gona fall over the corner
Ip 65 rating!! Bet it fares better than most.
they redesigned the pannel and went with one without glass in it due to the things exploding in 50 percent of them from minor abuse. the rest is relatively rugged
can you even makes capacitive touch with anything but some type of glass?
The SSD in these things is typically IDE
I'm surprised it is lead free, the Mil people don't like the PbF stuff, with the tin whisker problems etc. Of course there may be a non-commercial version in non PbF.
"We're in like Flynn" counter: 3
Extra point for 1 "We're in" and 1 "We're *certainly* in like Flynn".
Somebody drove a truck over it? We use these, and the Toughpads at work. We use them for inventory management, crew control, and meter reading. They are bloody tough units. We've had them driven over with cars, dropped off cherry-pickers from 8-10M up, onto concrete, drowned etc. Out of the few hundred we have, we only lose 1-2 a year. Very expensive, but TOUGH..
Cool!
Wiggle wiggle wiggle woo
So the "glay" cable was supposed to be "gray" :D Jinglish!
They put glass on the screen to filter the UV light that could shine over the LCD screen if there were used outdoor, enhancing the useful lifetime before it get degraded.
There is a similar combined WI-FI Bluetooth adaptor installed in the personal computer I am writing this on.