There is no shortage of well-made tablets, but unfortunately, many of them are driven by motherboards that are now seriously outdated. Since it seems unlikely that manufacturers will become a common practice to issue replacement motherboards for their old hardware in the short term, the community will have to do it by themselves. This is the project of [Evan] – designing a raspberry skin CM4 motherboard for the original iPad. It is designed to support everything you want: monitor, touch screen, audio, WiFi, Bluetooth, even dock port. In addition, it provides you with more powerful computing power so that you can take full advantage of it.
The original iPad was right in many ways, which was undoubtedly a factor in its success at launch. [Evan]’s high-strength improvement is used in conjunction with the iPad’s rich and good components, such as a solid shell, a customized lithium-ion battery, an easy to view LCD and a reliable capacitive touch screen. After all these components are assembled, you must install the new motherboard in the available space, and Evan has designed his own PCB to do this – leaving space for CM4 and the many ICs he added, so as not to leave any unrealized functions.
This project has been going on for more than a year. At present, fourteen information intensive work logs tell the story of this transformation. Reverse engineer capacitive touch screens and LCDs, break through all custom connectors, integrate custom audio codecs, debug device tree issues, access unexpected unconnected QFN pins in an unconventional way, and a wide range of power management design trips. [Evan] for those who want to update their old tablets, there are many things to teach!
The hardware files are open source, paving the way for others to reuse parts for their own modifications. We absolutely hope to see more reconstruction like this. This project is a part of the 2022 hackdee Award “hacking it back” project, and it seems to be very suitable for us. If you want an excuse to start a similar project, now is the time.