Today’s thing is an AppleTV Remote control. This got water damaged a while ago and has been sitting on my desk waiting for me to repair it. After a half-hearted attempt, I decided to boil it in acid instead.
Wait wait wait… I suppose I should show a pictures of the remote before the disassembly process started:
The remote is in fact, shockingly complicated. There’s an STM32 microcontroller, TMS320 DSP, CSR1010 bluetooth radio, MEMS MIC. Overall, this remote control is probably substantially more complicated than an early Nokia GSM phone:
At the top of the PCB there’s also this rather odd looking PCB launch diode. This is either a photodiode or an IR LED. I can’t quite figure out what they’d be using photodiode for. There’s no backlight on the keypad which might benefit from ambient light detection.
Launching out from the edge of the PCB a IR LED would make sense. Perhaps Apple use this as a backup (the AppleTV itself does have an IR receiver, and can be programmed to work with a regular remote control).
For an IR LED, it’s very fancy:
Ignoring all this beautiful over-engineering, I blasted as much heat as I could find at the PCB:
Post boiling, I obtained dies for whatever parts didn’t end up on the floor and stuck them to a slide:
On my old manual epi-illumination setup imaging these dies is a huge pain. But I got a few die shots. Overall boiling all these dies at once was a bit of a pain and they really need another go in the acid:
I did however particularly enjoy the Radish logo on one of the ICs. This from is the die above with the large patterned area on the right. This patterned area is possibly a tamper protection measure (you should be able to download the image above to see it at higher resolution).
That’s all I have for today. The Radish look pretty cool though!
Could it be the IR is to do with using the remote on a Mac laptop as well as on the Apple TV? I remember a few years back that there were Apple remotes for people plugging their Mac laptops to their TVs, then being able to stop/play the media while sat on the couch. No such need if you have an Apple TV, but maybe people can still use them on their laptop if they give a presentation?