{"id":3880,"date":"2015-11-24T19:35:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T23:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/?p=3880"},"modified":"2015-11-24T19:40:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T23:40:58","slug":"how-not-to-build-a-tablet-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/?p=3880","title":{"rendered":"How Not To Build A Tablet PC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just came across this video by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eevblog.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Dave of EEVBlog<\/a> (see below). Now, granted, a little Dave goes a long way &#8212; a lot of his videos consist of him ranting about how horrible some piece of tech or another is.<\/p>\n<p>Dave&#8217;s ranting is 100%\u00a0justified in this case. Someone custom-built a Windows XP tablet PC, and they seem to have used it as an opportunity to thumb their nose at just about every single electronics rule in the book.<\/p>\n<p>The power supply board (why they would hand-roll one when they&#8217;re a commodity item is beyond me) is <em>particularly<\/em> craptastic. They went to the trouble of making a two-layer board, only to basically not use the second side. They&#8217;re also using quite a few through-hole components as surface-mount components. It&#8217;s only a matter of time until those solder joints fail and come off the board.<\/p>\n<p>There are many, many other no-nos visible:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Cold solder joints throughout;<\/li>\n<li>Holding boards in place with double-sided tape;<\/li>\n<li>Soldering directly to rechargeable batteries without tabs;<\/li>\n<li>Packaging the batteries together with shipping tape;<\/li>\n<li>Leaving loose, unused wires in place (at least they put some shipping tape on them as a talisman to ward off electric short demons);<\/li>\n<li>Soldering a USB cable to a board, when a USB-to-mini-USB cable would do great;<\/li>\n<li>Using <del>at least three different battery packs<\/del>\u00a0<em>one<\/em> battery pack in three pieces;<\/li>\n<li>Using a heatsink pad in a halfhearted attempt to couple the heatsink to the case; and<\/li>\n<li>Using a heatsink with no provision for airflow. Where&#8217;s it going to dump the heat to, guys?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Dave is known for his over-the-top rants &#8212; but he gets a pass on this one. This is weapons-grade craptastic construction. (I suspect that either the company has VERY strong micromanagement &#8212; and\/or they&#8217;re using interns with almost no electronics experience.)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, it&#8217;s serial number 11 &#8212; so a few glitches are to be expected. But this thing is almost cargo-cult-like in its construction. I&#8217;m really surprised that it works. (It won&#8217;t, for long.) And this piece of crap was sent to a <em>client<\/em>. A <em>medical facility<\/em>, in fact! I wouldn&#8217;t have tried to turn this in as a class project. Its construction would be just too embarrassing. I&#8217;ve never seen any student projects anywhere\u00a0<em>near<\/em> this bad. Not even from freshmen who are learning electronics for the first time. At least they have intelligence and common sense.<\/p>\n<p>(Warning: this video may cause Computer Engineers to lose faith in humanity&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"EEVblog #822 - World&#039;s Worst Tablet Computer Teardown\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2o8MDCIlOEk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dave of EEVBlog has found a device worthy of a full-blown Dave Rant. It&#8217;s not pretty. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/?p=3880\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[306,384,238,380,381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-donottrythisathome","category-electronics","category-reverse-engineering","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3880"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3884,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880\/revisions\/3884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}