Orinoco-Insides
It’s been a while since I’ve destroyed something just to take photos of it – so here’s an Orinoco 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card ready for demolition
The card and delecate tools
The rear of said card.
Now off comes the top cover. It’s quiet a tight fit, and is put together pretty well – but it can’t hold up to my sense of curiosity and a pair of pliers. I actually ended up having to tear the metal and open it up like a sardine can. It was fun 
One sardine can card.
One more pic without the garbage plastic in the way. It’s probably there to stop stuff shorting to the metal bodywork of the card if you crush it a tad much during it’s normal life. You can see on this shot the pigtail that has been soldered to the card. We removed the internal antennas and the pissy little coax switch on the PCB and replaced it with the hard wired pigtail. The sheet of metal on the back of the card is to give the coax some support so it doesn’t rip the card in two. The coax is LMR-192 (i think) which is double shielded and very low loss. Ignore the bends in the case – it was a result of the gentle pressure required to open the thing.
Card minus plastic
Now we get rid of all the case. The card just lifts out of the rest of the case.
One naked card.
Heres the other side of the card – the cans (metal RF shields) had to go.
The flip side of the card.
Here’s the front of the card again with the cans removed.
Top of card with removed cans
Thoughts:
Well, the cards are very well built. It took a fair bit of force to rip it apart – the metal tore before the actual joins. The RAM chips on the card are 2 x 128K x 8bit low voltage CMOS SRAM in 32-pin TSOP packages – which probably hold the firmware uploaded by the driver (the windows drivers don’t perminently update firmware on the card) – probably one for the PRI and one for the STA firmware.
The main flash EPROM on the card is a 1Mbit 29LE010 – a 3v flash chip in 8×128k pages. This probably keeps the onboard firmware.
The construction of the PCB is very nice. It looks like a multi-layer PCB (I can’t tell how many) that is around 1mm thick. It’s pretty flexy – but it’s one hell of a well designed/manufactured board!
All in all, it seems to be well made, with pretty standard stuff on there – nothing extreme. Works well (unless you kill the firmware like our victims), and made to withstand the beating of every day use.
