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Our name is inspired by the constellation "Cassiopeia", and is suggested by yeongJIN_COOL, taking advantage of the beginning of the word cassiopeia be very similar to the word/brand casio. If you want to program for casio calculators you're in the right place! We are a young, but active community.
Classpad II fx-CP400 hardware - a hidden SD card reader ?
Today let's discover the Casio ClassPad II fx-CP400 hardware together. The calculator is quite easy to open once you get the trick. After removing all 6 screws on the back (including 4 inside the battery compartement), the entire front plate (screen and keyboard included) must be detached from the case by forcing on one of the corners And now, you get the ClassPad II fx-CP400 hardware: The hardware consists of two distinct PCBs :
It seems that is the second version of the motherboard, but of the first version of the power supply board. We can take that with two distinct boards, a future version powered by a rechargeable battery would be quite easy, and the system already supports it. The motherboard seems to have a setup close to the ones found on most recent Casio graphic calculators USB (Casio fx-9750Gii/fx-9860Gii, Casio Prizm fx-CG10/20). It's built around 3 integrated chipsets:
About the RAM, the RAM chip was also 2MB on the Casio Prizm, but only 64KB were available for the user. And here in a similar way, we've only got 512 KB available for the user! About the NAND Flash ROM, if the informations found on the official website are accurate, the chip should have a capacity of 32MB, but only 5.5MB would remain available for the end user. About the connectivity, a huge surprise awaits us. We've got:
This CN703 connector with its pinout of 9 contacts and one lateral contact, and by its shape that gives an empty space on the board is clearly a connector for an SD memory card reader! Unlike older Casio Classpad models, it is possible to add a SD card memory reader to the ClassPad II! We're not sure if Casio has a future project for this since it would be a forbidden module by exam regulations of some countries (including France). Traces of SD memory card reader support were already found on TI-Nspire and even on Casio Prizm fx-CG10/20 operating systems, although they were clearly missing from the hardware. In fact, it seems those readers are used during hardware development where they give a way to reprogram or emulate easily the content of the ROM memory during tests - and so avoid permanently bricking the calculator prototypes with bad code: you just need to switch the SD card. However, the community could clearly wonder if there wouldn't be some possibility for us to add a working SD card reader ourselves Source: http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12716&lang=en Views: 17524 • Comments: 2 • Write comments [ Back ]
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