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Having word press to go installed on my HTC Dream is probably not the best practice.

Looking to higher powers for help with this… leave a comment if you know something I don’t.

I’m considering taking a risk in hopes that my loss may sustain further development on mapping the pinout contact points to interface the JTAG cable to the G1 mainboard. One possible solution that I’ve encountered and have furiously debated with myself about is to use a toaster oven to heat up the mainboard thus liquefying the solder holding the ball pin array in place. A problem that has been discussed on several forums is that the processors are generally glued down using some sort of epoxy or silicon that will need to be removed in order to successfully remove the chip. This sounds like a daunting task and dangerous to the integrity of the device. Since this device was donated in hopes of actually fixing it and not just destroying it for the purpose of joy and science then I think I will continue to hope that someone else does it first… for at least a week or two. Any ideas?

In an effort to figure out the exact pinouts of the MSM7201a I have taken on researching the following project which I found on hackaday.com a few months ago. The direct link is located below the excerpt I took from this incredible site.

jtag – Hack a Day

Figuring out the JTAG pinout on a device turns out to be the most time consuming hardware portion of many hacks. [hunz] started a project called JTAG Finder to automatically detect the JTAG pinouts on arbitrary devices using an 8bit AVR ATmega16/32L microcontroller. Check out the slides (PDF) from the talk as they break down how one finds JTAG ports on an arbitrary device, with or without a pinout detection tool. [hunz] is looking for people to pick up the project where he left off.

Once you determine the correct pinout, you will need a JTAG cable: there are two main types, buffered and unbuffered, both of which I have soldered up and tested from these circuit diagrams (image of completed buffered cable here). The software most hardware people use today are the openwince JTAG Tools. To get the JTAG Tools to compile, grab the latest source directly from their CVS repository.

The last time we featured JTAG was with regards to Linksys devices, but the tools listed above can be applied to any device with JTAG.

I wanted to give a shout out to Asphaltor for hooking us up with a bricked G1. Thanks, we appreciate it!

Also, I’m working on hunting down the internal photos of the G1′s MSM7201a chipset mainboard off of the FCC site. No worries, this is perfectly legal and legit. I found the original submission with external photos that was submitted on August 18, 2008 but have had no luck with the internal pics. Please email me if you have these or know where one might look to obtain this information. Thanks!

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