In a previous news, we discovered that the TI-Nspire Zevio Magnum ASIC was supporting an external Boot1 NOR chip, present in TI-Nspire Lab Cradles but missing in TI-Nspire TouchPads.

Meaning that it could be possible to mod the TI-Nspire TouchPad PCB and add an external Boot1 chip flashed with whatever we want!



Did you know that TI developers do sometimes hard-mod calculators the same way hackers would do?

Just check -  thanks to Lionel Debroux, we just put our hands on a TI-73 VSC prototype:




Nothing really special from the outside? Let's just open it:


For one time, it seems we've put our hands on a prototype coming directly from Texas Instruments development team, and not from teachers evaluating it - the proof being that hardware mod around the ASIC chip.

What were TI developpers trying to accomplish?...



More and bigger images available from the TI-Planet news:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9352

How did you get your hands on that thing,

I received it from Romain Liévin, some time after becoming the maintainer of libti*/gfm/tilp.

and what does the hardware mod do?

I have no idea.
I seldom open calculators (I now have 23 TI graphing calculators, but I have opened at most 3, as far as I can remember), I didn't know that this 73 had a hardware mod

That's nice to have, but what does it mean for us?

Didn't you read the 1st sentence about hardware mods ?

It took the time, sometimes weeks, sometimes months... But most of my (apparently useless) discoveries led to great usefull tools/tutorials in the end


So I think it's a little too early for such a question

Yup, prying open stuff sure is fun. Plus it leads to interesting discoveries.