3: Taking it apart

Before soldering anything I had to take it apart. Because of Joe's insistence on looking out for static electricity I wore a antistatic bracelet maybe for the first time ever.

I believe ESD protection is a myth invented by big Static to sell more discharge.

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There's two screws on the back that hold the glossy front panel on. They screw right into the plastic of the panel and take a bit of force in the first few turns.

Holding the motherboard in place are more screws which are a bit shorter than the one on the outside. Mixing them up during reassembly would likely crack some plastic.

A left hand holding a screwdriver with a blue antistatic wristband on it.

A squeezebox classic with the front panel removed, exposing the motherboard.

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After the motherboard was out I disconnected the wifi antenna cables and removed the Wifi-Board and CPU-Boards seperately.

The motherboard of the squeezebox classic. It contains various small chips, capacitors and resistors. In center is a separate PCB housing the CPU with another PCB for wifi ontop. There's also another PCb that has sockets for digital and analogue audio, an ethernet jack and a power socket. That PCB is mounted at a right angle on the motherboard.

The aforementioned CPU and WIFI cards sitting side-by-side on the table. The WIFI card has a sticker declaring it as a IEEE 802.11b/g mini-PCI Card. Towards the side it has an edge-connector and most of the components are under a metal shield. The CPU card has three big chips, presumably one is the CPU, one ist the RAM and one some permanent flash for the firmware. There's also a third smaller chip and some surface mount components on the board.

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