Nokia n770 internally mounted SD card
This is an old post migrated from my blogspot account for posterity…
This post describes the internal mounting of an SD card on the Nokia n770. Unless using an SD card gives you a significant speed boost (I’ve yet to test this) I’m not sure it gives you any real advantage over using an RSMMC. However, nowhere around here would sell me an 2Gb RSMMC and I fancied some hacking. I have to say the SD does feel very nippy (In my case a 2Gb Corsair 60x card). The disadvantage of this mod is that you’ll lose the MMC socket on the n770. It might be possible to mount a full size SD card socket internally somewhere which I might try in the future. OK anyway, lets get on with it…
Disassemble the n770
First you need to remove the 5 screws which keep the n770 together, they are in the locations below (nothing under the sticker!):
You should then be able to pull the n770 apart. There is a small piece of plastic covering the ports at the bottom of the unit. This will unclip. The rest of the cover should then clip away. There are no other screws internally.
The LCD will kind of flop around, so be careful you don’t damage to cable. The pcb is attached to a plastic mount, the display PCB and mount should come out of the case as a single unit. Attached to the plastic mount is the Mic, remove the connector that err connects this to the PCB and move it to one side. Detach the PCB from the mount. Once this is done you can turn the PCB over and detach the LCD. Unplug the LCD socket, the LCD socket is hooked to the board, to detach it press down and pull. OK you n770 should be all in bits now…
Great isn’t it!
Internal SD Card mod
Now comes the actual mod which is very simple. To be honest I didn’t take any intermediate pictures here, so you’ll just have to look at the final result and follow the (simple) instructions. Firstly, it makes sense to short the MMC detect switch (this is the thing that tells the n770 if the door is open or closed. You don’t have to do this, you could just keep the door closed all the time, but hey while we’re here… 🙂
The above picture shows the location of the switch solder a length of wire between both sides (wirewap wire works best for surface mount components). As a side note, it would be nice if just by shorting this and leaving the MMC door open you could insert an SD card. Unfortunately the RSMMC socket isn’t thick (high) enough for an MMC card, a nice mod would be simply to replace the socket with one able to take thicker cards.
Next remove the cover of the RSMMC socket. It’s soldered to the board round the edges, you’ll need to desolder these which maybe difficult as being metal it will dissipate the heat, you might find it easier to hack it off (carefully!) with a craft knife… You’ll then expose the MMC connect which you can see already in the previous image.
Now connect up the SD card. I removed the SD PCB from is casing before mounting it in the n770, it makes it a little thinner (there’s not much space in there) and it makes soldering to the connector easier. You may not have this option if your SD cards IC is molded in to the casing. Anyway, solder the SD card pin for pin to the connector. Start on the left side and work your way to the right. You’ll need to skip the first pin and last couple (these are not present on MMC cards) make sure your connecting the correct pins by comparing the SD card connections to an MMC card.
That’s it! You may get and error saying the SD Card is corrupt, I needed to reformat the card (from the File manager) in order to fix this.
Mount the SD Card somewhere internally. I simply mounted it over the SD Socket, there seems to be just enough space.
Now, stick the n770 back together and your done!
That’s the basic mod, I may try mounting a full SD connector. Or perhaps swapping the RSMMC for a MicroSD socket. If I remember correctly more than once device can be connected to the MMC bus, so there may be an option to add multiple SD Micro SD cards internally?
Apologies for the poor quality of this howto (it’s 2am I’m knackered). If there is any interested I’ll tidy it up later.
Disclaimer: Don’t do any of this it’s stupid
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