TGMIBOEJ

The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk

12 April 2009

So the TGIMBOEJ arrived from trialex back in early January.  That means it has been sitting on the floor of my office for THREE MONTHS!!!!  I was originally planning to move it on within 2 weeks.  As this is a long weekend, I better make some effort to take a look inside (as much as I'd like to play with my new CNC pendant controller instead)

Stepper motors, gears, various connectors, LEDs, heat shrink, PCI network and sound cards, and quite a wide variety of miscellaneous parts.  I was quite impressed!

Photos at Flickr

First I pulled out a medium sized LCD panel - an Ampire 240 x 128 pixel dot matrix LCD. This is a reasonably nice display, but I've already got some similar ones so I decided to label it with some specifications, and leave it for someone else.

Next, I examined a small PCB which appeared to be an ethernet interface daughterboard, probably from a printer. A google search found that the main chip on the board (DP83846A) was an Ethernet 10/100 PHY. But the matching Ethernet MAC chip wasn't on this board, which made it a little difficult to use. I've got a couple of other Ethernet chips (CS8900) that I've hooked up to a 68HC11, but I didn't have the right ethernet "magnetics" (transformer) for those chips, and the one on this board wasn't suitable. Oh well, there are plenty of other easy to use Ethernet interfaces available these days for embedded use.

And then I noticed a Nokia 3120 labelled "Works except on/off button" and "Needs BL-5C battery". Hmmm... so many possibilities, but the Nokia phone reminds me that I wanted to do some experimentation with the Nokia FBUS protocol. Late last year I was working on a small solar powered telemetry system running Linux, and using Gnokki to send/received SMS's via an "industrial" GSM modem. These modems cost a few hundred dollars, so I thought it would be handy to be able to repurpose old Nokia handsets for prototyping, or at least for testing.

Without a battery, I would need to connect power directly. A quick test showed that it would power on when connected to my DC bench supply set at 3.8V/1A, so a good start! But in the process of further testing my power connection (via EZ hook clips) popped off, and when reconnecting I managed to connect it reverse polarity. The phone now no longer turns on at all... the magic smoke must have escaped! Frustrated, I went searching in my other junk piles in the workshop and found some other old Nokia phones, including a 3100 - almost identical to the 3120, but it showed signed of having been for a swim at some point in the past.

I cleaned up the 3100, soldered wires to the battery and FBUS pins, and powered it on. It said to "Insert SIM card" so I inserted a SIM, and powered it back on. Still the same error... and then I remembered that I hadn't added the required battery identifying resistor, so quickly added a 68k resistor between the centre battery terminal and GND. Now the phone powered on and showed the Nokia start up animation, and then cell info. Not sure if it was the resistor, or just a bad connection, but at least I was moving forward.

Next I connected the FBUS wires to a USB FTDI adapter running at 3.3v, and plugged that into to my PC. Google came up with a program called Gammu that supported FBUS, so I downloaded the Gammu command line client for Windows. Gammu was able to identify the phone, but I found I could not send a SMS from Gammu. I tested sending an SMS from the phone itself and it also didn't work. So thinking there might be some damage to the RF caused by the water damage, I tried calling my office phone and I got a recorded Optus message saying the phone was blocked. Ahhhh... well I think this phone came from a pile of stuff being thrown out at a client, so who knows what history it had behind it.

Well I've not had much luck, and at this point I think I should just pass on the TGIMBOEJ to someone else. After I add some goodies to replace the things I've removed of course.

So as to not have this work so far go to waste, I pulled out a couple of Nokia 3310's from the pile in the workshop. I recall picking these up on ebay when I was originally planning to play with the FBUS protocol. I may as well do it now... and yes, they worked well enough I was able to add a Lantronix Ethernet to Serial adapter and got an SMS gateway up and running under Linux using Gnokii and some shell script.

More about the "Brisvegas" TGIMBOEJ

19 July 2009:
I'm finally getting around to putting this up on the blog, as I've finally moved the box onto another recipient.

References:
http://www.mbarron.net/mbus/ - wasn't directly helpful, but reminded me some of the MBUS & FBUS details
http://www.lathey.co.uk/guides/NokiaPOP-PortPinout.pdf - pinout details for the Nokia 3120 external connector with FBUS connections (I couldn't find the details for FBUS via the internal test points, then realised this model had external connections)
http://www.embedtronics.com/nokia/fbus.html - a great page of info, particularly on examples of the protocol, plus the connection points for the 3310
http://www.gammu.org/ - software for testing once you've got the hardware connected to your PC
http://gnokii.org/ - the software I've used in the past with commercial industrial modems supporting the AT command set

Gammu identify response for Nokia 3310:
Manufacturer : Noki
Model : 3310 (NHM-5
Firmware : 05.13 G (11-01-02
Hardware : 100
IMEI : 3506073xxxxxx4
Original IMEI : 3506073xxxxxx4
Manufactured : 060
Product code : 050429
Simlock 1 : MCC+MNC 00101, opened, user , counter
Simlock 2 : GID1 0000, opened, factory, counter
Simlock 3 : GID2 0000, opened, factory, counter
Simlock 4 : MSIN 0000000001, opened, factory, counter
MSID : 839db2ed64xxxxxxxxx899f3fd
MCU checksum : FDD
DSP ROM :

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