I thought the GMKtec NucBox3 looked interesting (at least on paper) as candidate ROS brain, so I ordered one (*) for a closer look despite some skepticism. All pictures on that Amazon listing look perfect, I suspected they were all 3D computer renders instead of photos of an actual product. There’s a chance the actual product looked very different from the listing.

The good news: the product is real and for the most part, as depicted in the listing. I find good fit and finish on its plastic enclosure. There is one downside: fingerprints show up very clearly. I had to wipe down the case pretty aggressively for these pictures and I still see greasy smudges. Well, at least you know these aren’t renders! One instance where oily fingerprint smudges are a feature, not a bug.

I see two brass heat-set inserts on the bottom of the case which will be useful for mounting this little box somewhere. They look very small but this is a small lightweight box so it would probably suffice.

Here we also see where actual product differed from product listing rendering. The company website page for NucBox3 showed an access panel to upgrade memory or storage.

But there’s no such access panel on the real thing, and it’s not clear how to get inside without one. Documents in the box consisted of a minimal warranty card in the box and no instruction manual. No matter, the lack of a convenient access panel or a manual shall not deter me from getting inside for a look.

Hiding fasteners under glued-on rubber feet is a common and effective technique. These four fasteners are not symmetrical so, even though the box is a square, we need to remember correct orientation to reinstall.

Without a convenient access door for upgrades, I wasn’t sure what else would differ from listing picture. I was afraid memory and storage would be soldered-in parts, but I was relieved to find they were standard DDR4 RAM and M.2 2280 SSD as advertised. They’re just a tiny bit harder to access without the panel.

Judging by its M.2 keys, we have the option to upgrade this factory-installed SATA M.2 SSD to a higher-performing NVMe M.2 SSD if needed.

What appears to be empty threaded holes (marked with circles) are actually used to secure the CPU heatsink from the other side. (There’s a fourth one under RAM module and not visible in this image.) Four fasteners (marked with squares) secure the motherboard and must be removed to proceed.

The headphone jack protrudes into the enclosure, so we must tilt the mainboard from the opposite side for removal. But we have to be careful because we are limited by length of WiFi antenna wires.

A block of foam keeps WiFi antenna connectors in place, peeling it back allowed the connectors to be released. The antennae themselves appear to be thin sheets glued to the top of the case, similar to what I’ve salvaged from laptops. How securely were they held? I don’t know. I didn’t try to peel them off.

Freed of WiFi wires, I could flip the mainboard over to see a big heatsink surrounded by connectors. As chock-full of connectors as this product already is, I was surprised to see that there are still several provisions for even more connectors on the circuit board. I’m also very fascinated by connectors used here for USB3, HDMI, and DisplayPort. I usually see them oriented flat against the circuit board as typical of laptop mainboards, but without design pressure to be thin, these connectors are standing upright. This is a tradeoff to fit more connectors on the edge of a circuit board, but each connector must go deeper to obtain the necessary mechanical strength to withstand use.

Looking in from the side, the heatsink appears to have a flat bottom. This is good news if I want to mount a different heatsink on this board, possibly with a fan. The flat bottom means I don’t have to worry about sticking out to make thermal contact with other chips or have to cut a hole to clear protrusions. If I want to mount to the same holes, I will have to drill four holes which unfortunately are irregularly spaced but not an insurmountable challenge. All that said, I’m more likely to just point a fan at this heatsink if heat proves to be a problem.

Using this computer as robot brain also means running it on battery power. Nominal power requirements are listed as 12V up to 3A. My voltmeter measured the factory power adapter output at 12.27V. But what can this thing tolerate? I found this chip directly behind the DC power barrel jack, but a search for DC3905 WK1MEG (or WX1MEG) didn’t turn up anything definitive. Texas Instruments has a LP3905 and Analog inherited Linear Technology’s LT3905. Both chips are designed for DC power handling, but neither footprint matches this chip. This might not even be the power management chip, I’m only guessing based on its proximity to the DC barrel jack.

As far as I know, the highest voltage requirement on this PC are USB ports at 5V. On the assumption that nothing on this machine actually needs 12V, then all power conversion are buck converters to lower voltage levels. If true, then this little box should be OK running directly on 3S LiPo power (Three lithium-polymer battery cells in series) which would range from 12.6V fully charged to 11.1V nominal to 10V low power cutoff. I’ll use the power brick that came in the box to verify everything works before testing my battery power hypothesis.

(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Along with the “keyboard is broken” laptop, I was also asked to look into a mid-tower PC that would no longer turn on. I grabbed a power supply I had on hand and plugged it into the motherboard, which happily powered up. Diagnosis: dead power supply. I bought a new power supply for the PC to bring it back to life, now it’s time to take apart the dead power supply to see if I can find anything interesting. Could it be as easy as a popped circuit breaker or a blown fuse?

According to the label, the manufacturer has the impossibly unsearchable name of “High Power”. Fortunately, the model number HP1-J600GD-F12S is specific enough to find a product page on the manufacturer’s site. The exact model string also returned a hit for a power supply under Newegg’s house brand Rosewill, implying the same device was sold under Newegg’s own name. Amusingly, Newegg’s Rosewill product listing included pictures with “High Power” embossed on the side.

If there is a user-replaceable fuse or a user-accessible circuit breaker, they should be adjacent to the power socket and switch. I saw nothing promising at the expected location or anywhere else along the exterior.

Which meant it was time to void the warranty.

Exterior enclosure consisted of two pieces of sheet metal each bent into a U shape and held together with four fasteners. Once pried apart, I had to cut a few more zip-ties holding the cooling fan power wire in place before I could unplug it to get a clear view at the interior. Everything looks clean. In fact, it looked too clean — either this computer hadn’t been used very much before it blew, or it lived in a location with good air filtration to remove dust.

Still on the hunt for a circuit breaker or a fuse, I found the standard boilerplate fuse replacement warning. Usually, this kind of language would be printed immediately adjacent to a user-serviceable fuse. But getting here required breaking the warranty seal and none of the adjacent components looked like a fuse to me.

Disassembly continued until I could see the circuit traces at the bottom of the board. Getting here required some destructive cutting of wires, so there’s no bringing this thing back online. Perhaps someone with better skills could get here nondestructively but I lacked the skill or the motivation to figure things out nicely. I saw no obviously damaged components or traces on this side, either. But more importantly, now I could see that 120V AC line voltage input wire is connected to a single wire. That must lead to the fuse.

Turning the board back over, I see the line voltage input wire (brown) connected to a black wire that led to a cylinder covered in heat-shrink tubing and held in place by black epoxy. The shape of that cylinder is consistent with a fuse. The heat-shrink and epoxy meant this is really not intended to be easily replaced.

Once unsoldered, I could see the electronic schematic symbol for fuse printed on the circuit board. The “F” in its designation “F1” is consistent with “Fuse”, as do the amperage/voltage ratings listed below. This fuse is a few centimeters away from the caution message I noticed earlier, which was farther away than I had expected. My multi-meter showed no continuity across this device, so indeed the fuse has blown. I cut off the heat-shrink hoping to see a burnt filament inside a glass tube, but this fuse didn’t use a glass tube.

I started this teardown wondering if it was “as easy as a popped circuit breaker or a blown fuse”. While it was indeed a blown fuse, a nondestructive replacement would not have been easy. I don’t know why the fuse on this device was designed to be so difficult to access and replace, but I appreciate it is far better to blow a fuse than for a failing power supply to start a fire.

This video card built around a Radeon HD 7950 chip is roughly ten years old. It is so outdated, nobody would pay much for a used unit on eBay. Not even at the height of The Great GPU Shortage. I’ve been keeping it around as a representative for full sized, dual-slot PCIe video cards as I played with custom-built PC enclosures. But I now have other video cards that I can use for the purpose, so this nearly-teenager video card landed on the teardown bench.

Most of its exterior surface is covered by a plastic shroud, but the single fan intake is no longer representative of modern GPUs with two or three fans.

Towards the center of this board is a metal bracket for fastening a heat sink that accounted for most of the weight of this card. In the upper left corner are auxiliary PCIe power supply sockets. The circuit board has provision for a 6-pin connector adjacent to an 8-pin connector, even though only two 6-pin connectors are soldered to this board. Between those connectors and the GPU itself, I see six (possibly seven) sets of components. I infer these are power-handling parts working in parallel to feed a power-hungry chip.

This was my first 4K UHD capable video card, which I used via the mini-DisplayPort connectors on the right. As I recall, the HDMI port only supported up to 1080p Full HD and could not drive a 4K display. Finally, a DVI port supported all DVI capabilities (not all of them do): analog VGA on its DVI-A pins, plus dual-link DVI-D for driving larger displays. I don’t recall if the DVI-D plug could output 4K UHD, but I knew it went beyond 1080p Full HD by driving a 2560×1600 monitor.

The plastic shroud was held by six plastic screws to PCB and two machine screws to metal plate. Once those eight fasteners were removed, shroud came off easily. From here we get a better look at the PCIe auxiliary power connectors on the top right, and the seven sets of capacitors/inductors/etc. that work in parallel to handle power requirements of this chip.

Four small machine screws held the fan shroud to the heat sink. Fan label indicates this fan consumes up to 6 Watts (12V 0.5A) and I recall it can get move a lot of air at full blast. (Or at least, gets very loud trying.) It appears to be a four-wire fan which I only recently understood how to control if I wanted. Visible on the fan’s underside is a layer of fine dust that held on, despite a blast of compressed air I used to clean out dust bunnies before this teardown.

Some more dust had also clung on to these heat sink fins. It seems like a straightforward heat sink with stamped sheet metal fins on an aluminum base, no heat pipes like what we see on many modern GPUs. But if it is all aluminum, and there are no heat pipes, it should be lighter weight than it is.

Unfastening four machine screws from the X-shaped rear bracket allowed me to remove the heat sink, and now we can see the heat sink has a copper core for heat distribution. That explains the weight.

The GPU package is a high-density circuit board in its own right, hosting not just the GPU die itself but also a large collection of supporting components. Based on the repeated theme of power handling, I guess these little tan rectangles are surface mount capacitor arrays, but they might be something else.

Here’s a different angle taken after I cleaned up majority of thermal paste. An HD 7950 is a big silicon die sitting on a big package.

When I cleaned all thermal paste off the heatsink, I was surprised at its contact surface. It seems to be the direct casting mold surface texture with no post-processing. For CPU heatsinks, I usually see a precision machined flat surface, either milling or grinding. Low-power/low-cost devices may skip such treatment for their heatsinks, but I don’t consider this GPU as either low power or low cost. I know this GPU dissipated heat on par with a CPU, yet there was no effort for a precision flat surface to maximize heat transfer.

I think this is a promising module for reuse. Though in addition to the lack of precision flat surface, there’s another problem that the copper core is slightly recessed. The easiest scenario for reuse is to find something that sticks up ~2mm above its surrounding components, but not by more than the 45x45mm footprint of this GPU. This physical shape complicates my top two ideas for reuse: (1) absolute overkill cooling for a Raspberry Pi, or (2) retrofit active cooling to the passively-cooled HP Split X2. If I were to undertake either project, I’d have to add shims or figure out how to remove some of the surrounding aluminum.

My first SSD was a Patriot WARP V.2 32GB SSD. It not quite the bleeding edge, that “V.2” signified a revision that solved some issues in the first wave. Early experience with my first SSD was amazing enough for me to look for a larger 120GB unit to gain a little more elbow room in day-to-day use. They both represented early technology with flaws that needed solving before SSD became long-term reliable. I didn’t know that when I bought them, but it was certainly made clear as their performance degraded over a few years and then dying entirely when they no longer showed up as SATA drives when plugged them in. I took apart the first Patriot drive, now it’s time for the second OCZ drive.

Since they were both built around the JMF602 controller and arrived on market around the same time, I expected them to both utilize a JMF602 reference design. Before I opened up this SSD, I expected the circuit board to look identical to the smaller Patriot, just with higher capacity flash memory chips.

I found I was wrong when I opened up the case, this drive used a very different circuit board layout. This design placed the JMF602 at the center, and I don’t see an obvious debug header. There is still a connector adjacent to the SATA data port and it is populated on this drive: a USB mini-B socket that lets this SSD act as a USB flash drive.

Four more flash chips live on the other side of this board, again in a different layout compared to the Patriot drive. They seem to have the same production information sticker, but that might be some sort of industry standard sticker.

Thanks to the USB port, I could still access this drive even though the SATA port no longer enumerates. It is only an USB 2.0 connection, but I don’t think that is a constraint. Write performance has degraded to an atrocious level on this drive. Here I’m copying a single large ISO file to the drive. 25MB/sec throughput and a response time of nearly 500ms are well below limits of USB2.

Read throughput is only slightly better at nearly 40MB/sec and a 20ms read response time is significantly faster but still not great. Since this drive still works via USB, for now I’ll spare it the hot air treatment I performed to the Patriot. But given this level of performance I’m not sure if I can do anything useful with it.

When the cost of flash memory dropped low enough for consumer-level solid state drives to come to market, it was a time when multicore multi-gigahertz processors sit mostly idle waiting for data to be fetched from a spinning platter hard drive. SSDs resolved that performance bottleneck and provided a huge boost to overall system performance. But like all revolutionary technology, early implementations had some serious teething issues. Some problems required operating system support like TRIM to solve, which didn’t show up until later.

In those pre-TRIM days, the most affordable consumer-level SSD were built around a JMF602 controller. It helped make SSD affordable, but without TRIM and related functions, those drives weren’t durable. My first two SSDs used JMF602 and both drives died within two years of use. When I plug them into a computer’s SATA port, they no longer enumerate as devices as if they weren’t plugged in at all.

I forgot I had kept those two drives until I found them in my pile of old computer hardware. I might as well open them up before I dispose of them. I don’t expect to see much: just a circuit board inside a 2.5″ form factor metal case. But I was curious if those two circuit boards would be identical: it is fairly common for multiple manufacturers to use the same reference implementation and sell basically identical devices.

First up is Patriot’s WARP V.2 with a paltry 32GB capacity, model PE32GS25SSD.

I found the expected single circuit board inside. The infamous JMF602 chip amongst multiple Samsung flash chips. I see a row of four vias on the lower right edge resembling an unpopulated debug header. (Not that I’d know how to debug this thing.) In the lower left, adjacent to the SATA data connector, is an unpopulated connector blocked off by the metal case. We’ll see this again later.

Four more Samsung flash chips reside on the other side of the circuit board.

I now remember why I kept the drive even after it failed: I had personal data on this drive when stopped responding. Even though it doesn’t enumerate as a SATA device for me, I was worried that the data could still be recovered. Perhaps through that debug header, or possibly a SATA diagnostic tool could unlock it.

Making data really difficult to recover is easy with a spinning platter hard drive: I would open it up to expose those shiny platters. Everyday household dust would render those data surfaces unreadable except to maybe the NSA. But at the time I didn’t know how to perform similar data destruction with SSDs. I had contemplated drilling a hole through each flash chip, but now that I have a hot air rework station, I decided to remove all 16 flash chips from the board. If someone wants to steal my data, they’ll have to decipher how my data was spread across these chips and do a lot of soldering. I may still drill a hole through one of those chips just for curiosity, but first I want to compare and contrast this drive with my second SSD based on the same JMF602 controller.