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Palm M100 "Kaizo" Hack: 8 Megs On the Cheap

Posted by timothy on from the small-hands dept.

For those who must, absolutely and without fail, take apart anything electronic which crosses the threshold of their homes, Toolsmith writes, "Here's an interesting site explaining how to upgrade your Palm m100 to 8MB of memory. "Kaizo" is Japanese for "Upgrade". They show pictures of an m100 being upgraded from 2MB to 8MB. Here's the link. Has anyone tried this one yet?"

24 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Heh by vsync64 · · Score: 4
    "Must take apart anything electronic"... That's so true. I just bought a DVD player, and for some reason a disk got stuck in the tray. Now, the place I bought it is just a few blocks from my apartment, so I could easily have taken it back for service, but instead I just whipped out a screwdriver and started opening it up.

    I don't know if opening a DVD player will void the warranty, but I honestly didn't care that much. And it wasn't so much the disk or the player that I was concerned about; I was just suddenly filled with excitement that I had an excuse to see the inside of my new toy. It was at this point that I realized Wow, I bet most people wouldn't be doing this.

    Just thought I'd share... =)

    --
    TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
    1. Re:Heh by LMacG · · Score: 2

      I don't know if opening a DVD player will void the warranty, It's obvious that by opening your DVD player, you were clearly attempting to circumvent CSS at the hardware level, which must violate some section or other of the DMCA -- after all, that's what we paid Congress for. You'll be hearing from our crack legal team, but in the meantime, we demand that you supply us with your address, phone number, and samples of several bodily fluids.

      Respectfully,
      The MPAA
      Protecting Your Right To Watch What We Tell You To. And How to Do So. And When, Dammit!


      --
      Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
    2. Re:Heh by linuxonceleron · · Score: 2

      Well, I opened my reciever (Pioneer VSX-305) and silk screened onto one of the circuit boards is a woman's face and the word "YUKI" printed under it. Makes you wonder if the designer had a thing for this Yuki woman and never told anyone, just putting her face on the board...

      --

      Shine on, you crazy diamond.
  2. [OT, Redundant, Unoriginal, yadda yadda yadda] by Pont · · Score: 5

    For only USD 19.99, I can tell YOU how to turn any model of Palm Pilot into a paperweight.

    1. Re:[OT, Redundant, Unoriginal, yadda yadda yadda] by antifuchs · · Score: 2
      Well, my recipe tells you how to turn any of your friends' Palm Pilots into your Palm Pilots!

      1. Wait until they are not looking
      2. Snatch the Palm from them
      3. Run
      4. Seek new friends
      5. Rinse, Repeat

      Now that you have read this, you will have to pay me USD 10,90. Or not.


      --
      this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.

      --
      this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.
      echo [Address] | sed s/[-a-z]//g | tr A-Z a-z
  3. Has anyone got a steady hand? by mariab · · Score: 5

    This looked fascinating to me until I realised that you need to rework surface mounted components!

    I don't know how many people who read /. have tried this, but I have a few years ago. It is possibly one of the most incredibly difficult things you can attempt! I could move that little resistor they have marked, but to succesfully remove an entire DRAM chip and resolder a new one would require some extraordinary skill!

    Even when I was at my most practised and my hands seemed rock steady to me I would NEVER have attempted this!

    even now i could remove the chip, but to put in place a new one would be unthinkable

    Please no-one try this unless you are completely sure you can pull it off, I have visions of hundreds of wrecked palms from people try to do this.

    If you DO want to try it still .. good luck :)
    but don't come crying if your Palm gets amnesia ;)

    --
    meow! Maria
    1. Re:Has anyone got a steady hand? by Dahan · · Score: 2
      It's not too difficult if you have the right (i.e. expensive :) tools... I took a class on surface mount soldering at the local community college (for no particular reason), and to remove surface mount chips, we used a large rectangular iron tip that would heat all the pins at once. Let it heat for a while so all the solder melts, and give it a little twist, and it comes right off.

      For those of us with lesser means, if you don't care about saving the original chip, you could probably use some small diagonal cutters to clip all the pins, then desolder the pins individually. If you do want to try to keep the original chip, use desoldering wick on the pins and gently lift them up. (Then you'll have to try to bend 'em all back in line if you want to use the chip elsewhere... if I were doing this, I wouldn't worry about keeping the old chip... that's way too much work :)

      As for the resoldering part, that's actually not that hard... take a surface mount soldering class to find out how it's done ;)

    2. Re:Has anyone got a steady hand? by rodgerd · · Score: 2
      Please no-one try this unless you are completely sure you can pull it off, I have visions of hundreds of wrecked palms from people try to do this.

      And if the OC craze is anything to go by, they'll go around whining about it.

      Don't get me wrong; hardware hacking is fun, and clueful hardware hackers can do way cool stuff, but I get sick of people complaining that a product line is unreliable (because they keep OCing components until they fail), or who turn up on mailing lists complaining about hardware bugs (and then let slip that they're running heavily - 1.5-2x normal - OCed components, and whine that OCing can't be the problem). Too many people, IMO, are delving into stuff they don't really understand, and then bleating when they wind up with broken stuff.


      --
      My name is Sue,
      How do you do?
      Now you gonna die!
    3. Re:Has anyone got a steady hand? by mariab · · Score: 2

      Well, I actually taught myself how to do this :)

      oh, and clipping all the pins IS a cheating method, but hey, it is how i would have done it, then your can remove the old solder and remains of legs at you leisure.

      And yes, whilst soldering a new chip in is technically quite simple (hint: stick the chip down to hold it in place, but don't use massively strong glue in case you want to reposition it :). that is a fantastically huge number of pins and I would never be able to keep my hand steady enough to do it without making a mess of the whole thing :(

      all through this, you have to make sure you only apply as much heat as you need, because too much heat will make all the tracks on the board curl and peel off. I watched this happen once, it was a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.... AND the damn solder still didn't melt

      ok, time to stop waffling and go back to working :)

      --
      meow! Maria
    4. Re:Has anyone got a steady hand? by tzanger · · Score: 2

      I can't believe that got a +5 informative... and I can't believe I just complained about moderation... I guess there's a first for everything!

      This looked fascinating to me until I realised that you need to rework surface mounted components!

      Anything you want to hack these days you will do so by reworking SMT. It's a fact of life until we get to molecular circuitry, at which point I think the game will be over for most people. Hell I think with the BGA stuff now it pretty much is over for the hobbiest.

      It is possibly one of the most incredibly difficult things you can attempt! I could move that little resistor they have marked, but to succesfully remove an entire DRAM chip and resolder a new one would require some extraordinary skill!

      Actually reworking SMT is not all that hard. I used to assemble PCMCIA video cards (204 pin TQFP, some SOJ, a handful of 1206 resistors and capacitors, etc.) with nothing more than a pair of tweezers and a fine pitch soldering iron.

      Rework is slightly more difficult but the simple truth is that if you're going to throw away an IC, the best way to get it off the board is to take a razor blade and cut the pins off flush with the case and then remove the pins from the board. Much cleaner, and much less chance of damaging the board itself. If you've got to save the chip things get more difficult in a hurry but that's another story.

      even now i could remove the chip, but to put in place a new one would be unthinkable

      Placing a TQFP or other fine-pitch component is a piece of cake. You need that fine point iron, some solder flux and solder:

      • make sure the pads are clean (i.e. flat)
      • take your flux pen and put a fair amount of flux on the pads (just wipe it across a whole row at a time)
      • place the chip down and carefully line it up
      • tack down one corner of the chip. There should be enough solder to short 3-4 leads together
      • re-align the device (it should only need submillimeter realignment) and tack down the other corner
      • use the flux pen and wipe it across all the pins, a whole row at a time
      • Now this is the tricky part... you literally drag the soldering iron across one side of the chip.
      If you had enough of a solder blob and the iron angle is right and you've got enough flux, you will leave a perfect amount of solder on each pin and the solder job will be indistinguishable from a professionally mounted device. The speed at which you drag it is enough to heat up the pad and the pin sufficiently and the capilliary action of the solder "sucks" it under the pin and bonds it to the pad. I destroyed a few devices (bent the pins, you can never get them looking right again) with the wrong angle but once I got the hang of it down, I could do a 204 pin PQFP in about 6 minutes. I did up 150 prototypes that summer and not one had a failure in the solder work.

      This kind of stuff can be done, and quite easily... you just need to keep your most valuable resource (patience!) handy and keep your excitement in check.

  4. Wrong. by BJH · · Score: 5


    Kaizo doesn't mean "upgrade"; it means "alteration" or "modification".

    BTW, if you go here you can read the original Japanese (and if you can't read Japanese, you can look at the pictures of the place where they did the modification - a little bar in Akihabara). The hack is more impressive when you realize they did it while getting drunk ;)

  5. Ti-graphing calculaor by Duke+of+Org · · Score: 3

    Is it possible to do this same type of hack to a TI-83+ due to the fact they use the same type of proc (Dragonball Z80)?

    You all don't know how bad it sucks to have only 28k (iirc) to store games on. I can only get about 2-3 games on their at max. Some games even take up the whole amount (like the doom port which has only 4 screens, front, left, right, front with baddie shooting.)

    1. Re:Ti-graphing calculaor by Emil+Brink · · Score: 2

      I wouldn't know (I'm a HP guy, and at the price I paid, I'm almost afraid to think about a soldering iron in the same room as I keep it). Anyway, just a minor nit here: the DragonBall is a MC680x0 workalike, not a Z80. The 68K, of course, is everyone's favourite old 16/32 bit CPU, while the Z80 is a hardcore 8-bitter. OK? Thanks.

      --
      main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
  6. C'mon, fess up. by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 3

    That was an adult DVD wasn't it, and it would be too embarressing to take that to the repair shop or your parents were due back in 30 minutes!

    Naturally, nothing like that has ever happened to me. Ever. No matter what anyone else says.

    --
    Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
  7. Re:Heh - some people are born that way by abdulwahid · · Score: 2

    "Must take apart anything electronic..."

    Reminds me of when I was young and got my first HiFi system. I was so happy and the first thing I did was take it to pieces to see how it worked. I broke it down until I had taken all the drive belts off the cassette player and and all the cogs off the spindles.

    My parents were horrified that I had trashed my birthday present within a few hours. I guess though some people have a natural inclination to find out how things work. Even at the risk of breaking something you love. Hey, this is how we all manage to be Linux hackers. We want to know how things work inside. We can never settle for the closed world of Windows(tm).

    --
    perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
  8. PalmV 2MB to 8MB for US $50 in Hong Kong by terrence · · Score: 4

    I saw someone did the conversion in a computer mall in Hong Kong for around US $50. You pay the money and the guy will crack open your PalmV, pull the memory and resolder a new chip right in front of you in less than 15 minutes. It's really amazing. I think maybe these guys just have very steady hands. You can see more infomation about Palm upgrade here which is linked to the Singapore Palm User's Group Linked Web Pages.

    --
    -- Terrence Ma
  9. So far, so good, so what? by broody · · Score: 3
    So what, palm hacking is old news.

    This site is for hacking the IIIe/IIIx if anyone gives a fuck.

    --
    ~~ What's stopping you?
  10. Visor, anyone? by karmma · · Score: 2

    This link will take you to a Handspring Visor page. It's more exploratory surgery than an upgrade, but it's fun for those of us who want to see the Visor's innards

  11. 8mb upgrade, easy as pie. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    i did it, and it aint that hard. for more info go to : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tew/m100hack/ alot easier, and better english!

  12. Palm OS will only address 12MB by gelfling · · Score: 3

    That's about it. The OS is limited in the amount of RAM it can address so 12MB is the max including ROM. I suppose you could build a 4MB ROM, flash it and add an 8MB RAM for a total of 12MB but that sounds like engineering for the sake of engineering.

    Also for those of you who aren't real familiar with the Palm be aware that more storage = less battery.

    1. Re:Palm OS will only address 12MB by killbill · · Score: 3

      Actually, while this is true, the TRG Pro includes an "autoCF" tool that will dynamically (and for the most part invisibly) swap applications and databases in and out of the memory in its compact flash slot.

      That means that my 8 meg TRG Pro has about 20 megs of applications and data loaded, and still has 4 megs free :)

      You are right as well about increased battery usage, but we should keep it in perspective... Even with some 26 Megabytes in my TRG Pro, I still get over a week at a time usage of rechargable alkalines (at about 65% discharge).

      Bill

      --
      Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
  13. Re:What's the Point? MP3! DivX! by deusx · · Score: 3

    Or, umm, you could put some handy books on it. For instance, I have the entire Perl CD Bookshelf on mine under iSilo, so I see the HTML version, pictures & all.

    Screw movies & mp3's. I want something useful in my pocket. Movies, I'll rent or buy for my DVD player. Music, I'll buy a dedicated mp3 player. That's not what my PDA is for.

  14. Interesting, settings wiped out of course... by Fross · · Score: 3

    a point to note if you want to try this, or anything else, is that all your settings on your palm will get wiped out - you can see this by comparing the "before" and "after" pictures on the kaizo site - the addressbook has dropped from 2k to 1k, presumably an empty minimum size.

    just bear in mind that not *everything* gets backed up in a hotsync. but apart from that, happy hacking!

    fross

  15. Anybody have a source for the chips? by killbill · · Score: 2

    I found a couple of people offering to do this hack for you for $79 or so. They have been doing this thing on the Palm V's for some time now, and the M100 is a far easier mod.

    But I can't find an online source for the chips. Anybody scare up a wholesaler that has these in stock and is willing to deal in small volumes?

    I did a very similiar hack to turn my original Pilot 5000 (512k) into a professional (1MB... woo hoo!). Great fun. Make sure you have a grounded soldering iron, otherwise you could very easily blow the gates internal to the chip.

    Bill

    --
    Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.