Disassembling the US Nintendo DSi

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday iFixit tore apart the Nintendo DSi and found several internal upgrades from the outgoing DS Lite. It seems that an experienced hand can completely disassemble the DSi in less than ten minutes using standard tools, especially since the job does not require a tri-wing screwdriver. This should make repairing and tinkering with the DSi substantially easier. The DSi now includes two integrated cameras that, unfortunately, have only 0.3 megapixel resolution. This is certainly a bit underwhelming considering most mainstream phones have cameras of at least 1.3 megapixels. As for chips, Nintendo is using a Samsung MoviNAND integrated 256 MB Flash memory / MMC controller chip, as well as a custom ARM CPU + GPU is stamped with the revision code 'TWL.' The DSi's chips all had manufacture dates around September 2008, indicating that Nintendo has been stockpiling these devices for quite a while prior to the North American release."

Comments

Homebrew applications, etc

[kamelkev]

I'm really curious if the various mechanisms for running homebrew applications still work.

I have an R4 chip from my regular DS - my guess is they've closed up whatever hole was opened and a new method will be found, but has anyone tested this so far?

They're always perfect circles

[tepples]

Each side of the sensor bar has half a dozen infrared LEDs in a line. But have you ever noticed that the dots on the Wii Remote sensitivity screen are always perfect circles? The screen actually reads the four biggest blobs (X, Y, brightness) and draws them to the screen as circles with radius proportional to brightness. So you're not seeing the direct output of the 128x96 pixel* sensor in the Wii Remote but instead an interpretation of this info.

* The effective resolution is 1024x768 because the remote's firmware uses brightness and area information to refine the estimated position of the centroid of each blob to 1/8 pixel increments.