Chromecast Teardown | Hacker News Reader

Chromecast Teardown

ifixit.com

98 pointsjonbaer36 comments

It's amazing how much stuff they can fit in a tiny dongle now. 512MB of ram - tower computers barely had that 10 years ago.

A few years ago I thought it impressive as hell that a several hundred dollar smartphone could have that much. Now for $35...

Even more amazing was the little yellow square about the size of a surface mount resistor was highlighted as 2GB of flash. I couldn't even spot the cyan square for 512MB of ram.

I think you've gotten confused. Step 6 shows the 2GB flash taking up most of the body on the bottom side – you might need to mouse-over the correct image. The RAM takes up about half the neck.

I guess you miss a lot when JS is disabled by default :P

What you're looking at is the die of an LED. Almost made the same mistake myself.

Not really. The Chinese counterpart cram in much better CPUs and overall hardware and are on the market for several months already. Did I mention cheaper?

Which Chinese counterpart?

Just google for "android hdmi". They were all over Hong Kong/Taiwan when I was there earlier this year, and generally just had the latest dual-core Android phone guts in a similar tiny plug-in case.

The cheapest one I could find was $37 with free shipping to the US.

I found this by using google shopper to search for "android hdmi" and sorting low to high.

Here: http://dx.com/p/m2a-android-4-0-network-media-player-w-wi-fi...

Basically double the specs of Chromecast with a USB expansion slot. That said this seems to just run android with wifi on your TV. I'm not an Android person so I'm not sure what the quality of streaming apps are to compare to Chromecast but they serve different purposes.

This is more like an Android version of AppleTV, and as an AppleTV owner I can say that navigating with a remote is horrible, I only use it for Airplay and XBMC. So there's the issue of how usable is Android stick (the pictures look cool but don't say much).

There are many simple media players/streamers out there, in much the same size unit and some with noticeably higher spec (though most probably with noticeably lower build quality) for more-or-less the same price. Most are basic Android devices I think.

Pentium 4s and the early AMD64s could have up to 4GB of RAM. I had 3GB in mine back in 2003. The average consumer might not have had that much though. Anyone playing games or running things like Photoshop had much more than just 512MB.

The H2G2-42 thing is pretty funny!

On a more serious note... Can anyone shed some light on the hackability of this piece of hardware?

Unclear - unlike most phones, it has no removable storage, and my impression (having only heard descriptions of the UI) is that there's no way to run arbitrary code on the device. Unless it has accessible serial ports or some netboot mode hidden in it, or in the very scary case that the software update mechanism is insecure enough to MITM it yourself, it seems like it would be difficult to get a Chromecast to run anything other than Google's software.

It was rooted couple days ago but Google patched it right up

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/google-chromecast-hacked-by-gtv...

I can understand why they would want to lock it down simply from a security perspective. I don't want every piece of software on my network to be able to alter the software. Its bad enough with routers.

The FCC filing for the Chromecast shows a slightly different piece of hardware, with an external ribbon connector on the board. It's the brown & black part on the underside of the board. You can also see where the RF/heatsink can was cut to make room for a flex cable:

http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/innards.png

Perhaps the pads are still there and can be used to jump JTAG or a serial line out of the board.

I can't shed much light, only make a couple guesses, but it supposedly will not play MPEG2. Roku players cannot play MPEG2 either, but you can purchase a license to decode MPEG2 on a Raspberry Pi.

MPEG2 decoding would let people play a locally broadcast streams from something like the Silicon Dust HDHomerun Prime which would let them get rid of up to three cable boxes in addition to watching video on the internet. Currently, people get HTPCs to play these live streams (and act as DVRs).

Instead you would still have to have something transcode the video for the Chromecast, and perhaps act as a centralized content server either relaying live TV or recorded TV. However, it also is not clear if there will be private channels which would be required to view this content from a local source. Roku players will let you watch stuff served from Plex for example.

Interestingly, though according to this[1], the Marvel chip does have the capability to process MPEG2, perhaps if it is unlocked. (It only costs about $2 to get a license to legally unlock MPEG2 decoding on the Raspberry Pi)

However, supporting hobbyists playing back conventional cable wouldn't fit into Google's strategy if it is to slowly supersede regular cable television.

[1] http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=169737&page=9

I think there's a whole range of existing Android HDMI sticks that come close in price and far exceed it in specs and hackability to the point where you don't really need to hack them, just install android apps to do whatever you want.

> just install android apps to do whatever you want.

Until there's a Chromecast receiver app for Android, they won't be able to do the one thing that people want to do with Chromecast sticks.

If that's the one thing people want to do with a hacked Chromecast, then they don't need to hack it.

People want to extend the functionality, not replace it with a general purpose computer. There are already a lot of those on the market.

A proof-of-concept Android app, so you can emulate a chromecast on an Android HDMI stick (or tablet).

https://plus.google.com/107130354111162483072/posts/KMMwKTpN...

http://www.amazon.com/MK808-Android-Rockchip-RK3066-Cortex-A...

http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/77977-ubuntu-1210-complete-a...

My computer in 1998 had:

- the same amount of storage (2GB)

- 1/16th of the RAM

- No wireless (modem instead)

- Pentium II -_-

- more than 500 time the weight.

- and was playing choppy video at 240p

Take that!

One gem, in case somebody missed it:

Model Number: H2G2-42.

- Wasn't "42" the answer to life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

- And H2G2 is an abbreviation given to the book, as well as the name of a website dedicated to making a guide to life, the universe, and everything.

We see what you did there, Google. Your clever nerd humor will not be lost on us!

What I would really like them to make hackable is the protocol. Anyone knows what the chromecast is using? It'd be awesome to create "Chromecast" servers that can receive video and browser tabs wirelessly.

https://github.com/dz0ny/leapcast

http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/

One of the articles stated it uses WebRTC (video conferencing) for showing the Chrome tab. I wish Google has made it more open and supported standards like DLNA and Miracast and WiDi myself. Better off with Netgear at this point.

https://developers.google.com/cast/

I hope they can make a Wi-fi ac one next year, or maybe even ad? That's faster (7 Gbps 60 Ghz) and should work well for this type of use case, but I guess your router has to support it, too, and I'm not sure if ad will catch on that much.

I doubt this is a priority. 802.11n can happily stream 1080p video, which is the most bandwidth-intensive thing this thing can handle (it can't drive a 4k display so far as I know). A 5GHz radio, on the other hand, would be pretty great; in my neighborhood, at least, the 2.4GHz band is pretty shot.

I would also like to see this thing run on the 5 GHz band. My apartment unit has 30+ available 2.4 GHz wi-fi connections from my living room. Streaming HD video & gaming on 2.4 GHz can be quite a bit of hit-or-miss with the interference.

Marvell Armada 1500 Mini: http://www.pcper.com/category/tags/marvell-88de3005

Armada 1500 is used in Google TV: http://www.marvell.com/digital-entertainment/armada-1500/

Seems like the Mini is a single-core version of that chip.

What's the BOM or cost of materials on this thing?

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