ericj
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 8,346
- Likes
- 270
My old H120 (old enough it's marked iHP-120) just keeps going and going, and rockbox just keeps getting better and better.
So I decided to max it out. Or at least, max it as far as can economically be done. 64gb CF cards are theoretically available somewhere but i can't find any, and they probably cost hundreds of dollars still.
I don't frequently change the contents of the iriver, so the write speed of the card isn't a big issue for me. So i went with the cheap adata 32gb card from newegg like most everybody else.
Maybe when 64gb cards fall under $100 I'll upgrade again.
A few months ago i got distracted while changing out some of the contents of the harddrive and ended up going to bed without disconnecting the h120 from usb - and it turns out that it won't automatically shut down when usb is connected. ever.
So i got up and went to work the next day with a dead battery in the H120 and no charger. Ever since then, i wanted to enable USB charging strictly so that this could never happen again.
The RTC chip? heck, it's a free sample from Maxim! Might as well! And since I'm going in, isn't it about time for a new battery?
On to the pics!
I was inspired by Dr. Xin's hack here. I think he used a much smaller schottky diode than my old-stock 1n5817. The red wire is 30awg SPC / teflon.
This turned out to be the absolute hardest part of yesterday's upgrade effort. I'm used to soldering to small pieces, but i didn't consider the fact that there's nowhere for me to secure the wires before i solder them down, or that the angles are all wrong, or that all the solder points are recessed.
This was not well planned as i went in thinking that i could solder the diode directly to the DC jack. I'm very aware of how ugly the solder joints between the wires and the diode are, but they work, and by the time i settled on this installation method the only way to make it pretty would have meant pulling another diode out of the parts bin - and schotts are expensive! Like, 20 cents!
It took two and a half times as long to successfully install this single diode than to install the RTC. And then when i was done, it turned out that i had somehow invisibly bridged not just the pad next to the power leg on the usb connector, but the next one over as well. Even under magnification i couldn't see where i'd done it, but the ohmmeter does not lie. The tip of an x-acto blade made short work of it, though.
Oh, and it doesn't fit there at all. I had to move the diode.
This was relatively simple to install. See the rockbox wiki for the details. Basically the dallas clock chip gets it's legs shortened and is stuck upside-down to the board with double-sided tape and wired in with 32awg wrapping wire. No fuss, no muss, no solder bridges.
This means that recordings can now be time stamped, and that the iriver can be used as a clock. Did i mention the chip is free?
There's also an alarm feature that could potentially be used to automatically record from FM radio on schedule, but there's no software for that yet.
Just a $5 adapter from dealextreme. I removed the jumper and then soldered a bit of wire across the pads. Also scraped the LED off the adapter board because every miliamp counts, right?
You can't see it very well in the picture but there's a piece of tape on the back of the cf card and adapter securing them together, and another piece of tape securing the adapter to the ide connector that also holds the diode in place.
And of course a CameronSino 2200mAh battery - about $13 shipped on ebay iirc. These come highly recommended and there are no reports of this brand ballooning up like most cheap li-poly packs do. The battery is secured by two strips of industrial-grade double-sided tape just like the original was. (I have two big rolls of it - handy stuff to have around.)
As you can see, the adapter ends up sitting at an angle, and is maybe a little tiny bit thicker than the harddrive. You could probably grind down the plastic on the cf connector to make up the difference, but in practice it doesn't actually matter - it fits anyway.
And here you can barely see the clock plugin in binary mode. Geeky enough?
In order to use the RTC, you have to have a rockbox build with the rtc bits enabled, which means you get to compile it yourself. This turned out to be much easier than i imagined - but that's a relative thing. There are 5 linux machines in my house and my first crossdev experience was 8 years ago, when i was doing QA for an embedded linux vendor that no longer exists.
When it was all finished, I was shocked to find that everything worked perfectly the first time.
My digital scale tells me that the h132 is 25 grams lighter than the h120, too. It feels weirdly light and sort of hollow now.
Boot time is amazing, and switching tracks is much faster now as well. I had no idea how much of the usability of the h120 came down to waiting for the harddrive to spin up. I highly recommend the CF upgrade.
If someone desperately wants a real time clock in their h1x0 but won't dare solder it in, i still have my other free sample chip and i suppose maybe we could work something out.
So I decided to max it out. Or at least, max it as far as can economically be done. 64gb CF cards are theoretically available somewhere but i can't find any, and they probably cost hundreds of dollars still.
I don't frequently change the contents of the iriver, so the write speed of the card isn't a big issue for me. So i went with the cheap adata 32gb card from newegg like most everybody else.
Maybe when 64gb cards fall under $100 I'll upgrade again.
A few months ago i got distracted while changing out some of the contents of the harddrive and ended up going to bed without disconnecting the h120 from usb - and it turns out that it won't automatically shut down when usb is connected. ever.
So i got up and went to work the next day with a dead battery in the H120 and no charger. Ever since then, i wanted to enable USB charging strictly so that this could never happen again.
The RTC chip? heck, it's a free sample from Maxim! Might as well! And since I'm going in, isn't it about time for a new battery?
On to the pics!
I was inspired by Dr. Xin's hack here. I think he used a much smaller schottky diode than my old-stock 1n5817. The red wire is 30awg SPC / teflon.
This turned out to be the absolute hardest part of yesterday's upgrade effort. I'm used to soldering to small pieces, but i didn't consider the fact that there's nowhere for me to secure the wires before i solder them down, or that the angles are all wrong, or that all the solder points are recessed.
This was not well planned as i went in thinking that i could solder the diode directly to the DC jack. I'm very aware of how ugly the solder joints between the wires and the diode are, but they work, and by the time i settled on this installation method the only way to make it pretty would have meant pulling another diode out of the parts bin - and schotts are expensive! Like, 20 cents!
It took two and a half times as long to successfully install this single diode than to install the RTC. And then when i was done, it turned out that i had somehow invisibly bridged not just the pad next to the power leg on the usb connector, but the next one over as well. Even under magnification i couldn't see where i'd done it, but the ohmmeter does not lie. The tip of an x-acto blade made short work of it, though.
Oh, and it doesn't fit there at all. I had to move the diode.
This was relatively simple to install. See the rockbox wiki for the details. Basically the dallas clock chip gets it's legs shortened and is stuck upside-down to the board with double-sided tape and wired in with 32awg wrapping wire. No fuss, no muss, no solder bridges.
This means that recordings can now be time stamped, and that the iriver can be used as a clock. Did i mention the chip is free?
There's also an alarm feature that could potentially be used to automatically record from FM radio on schedule, but there's no software for that yet.
Just a $5 adapter from dealextreme. I removed the jumper and then soldered a bit of wire across the pads. Also scraped the LED off the adapter board because every miliamp counts, right?
You can't see it very well in the picture but there's a piece of tape on the back of the cf card and adapter securing them together, and another piece of tape securing the adapter to the ide connector that also holds the diode in place.
And of course a CameronSino 2200mAh battery - about $13 shipped on ebay iirc. These come highly recommended and there are no reports of this brand ballooning up like most cheap li-poly packs do. The battery is secured by two strips of industrial-grade double-sided tape just like the original was. (I have two big rolls of it - handy stuff to have around.)
As you can see, the adapter ends up sitting at an angle, and is maybe a little tiny bit thicker than the harddrive. You could probably grind down the plastic on the cf connector to make up the difference, but in practice it doesn't actually matter - it fits anyway.
And here you can barely see the clock plugin in binary mode. Geeky enough?
In order to use the RTC, you have to have a rockbox build with the rtc bits enabled, which means you get to compile it yourself. This turned out to be much easier than i imagined - but that's a relative thing. There are 5 linux machines in my house and my first crossdev experience was 8 years ago, when i was doing QA for an embedded linux vendor that no longer exists.
When it was all finished, I was shocked to find that everything worked perfectly the first time.
My digital scale tells me that the h132 is 25 grams lighter than the h120, too. It feels weirdly light and sort of hollow now.
Boot time is amazing, and switching tracks is much faster now as well. I had no idea how much of the usability of the h120 came down to waiting for the harddrive to spin up. I highly recommend the CF upgrade.
If someone desperately wants a real time clock in their h1x0 but won't dare solder it in, i still have my other free sample chip and i suppose maybe we could work something out.
