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EZCast M2 teardown

The microUSB plug on my newly acquired EZCast / Miracast dongle came loose so, obviously, I had to take it appart.

The system is based around a single chip: AM8251 - a single-core ARM9 system-on-chip built specifically for this purpose.
There's an XDA thread on units similar to this:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2632288
and on one of the manufacturers' forums:
http://forum.iezvu.com/bbs-en/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=802

The big chip on the other side is a Samsung NAND flash chip, probably this one (K9F1G08U0E).
I don't know what the smaller IC is, but I assume it's the WiFi stack chip.

Small review:

It does the job fine especially at 720p. Ironically (or not) AirPlay mirroring has less lag and dropouts than Android mirroring. Tested with iPad Air, Galaxy S5 and Motorola Razr.

Other users are complaining about a lot of dropouts but I'm not experiencing that. I'm sharing the WiFi through a FritzBox 7390, so perhaps the quality of the router also matters.

Unfortunately it cannot fully replace the existing ChromeCast dongle I have so I'm forced to use both: ChromeCast for YouTube videos and EZCast for everything else.

Desktop mirroring is decent, I can stream Amazon Prime ('Instant Video') movies and they are watchable at 720p. At 1080p the framerate is too low. Tested with a Core i7 laptop running Win8.1 through a 300Mbps wireless connection on 5 GHz.





Comments

  1. third chip is SpecTek ram (owned by micron)
    then you have 24mhz clock generator, 3 buck voltage converters (Im guessing 1.2 1.8/2.5 and 3.3), footpring for bluetooth radio module, micro USB socket you ripped off, and serial console pads next to flash chip
    wifi should be on separate dongle you plug into micro usb

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the comment, I haven't thought the WiFi chip is inside the cable.
      Studying some more it seems it has Linux inside, would be nice to turn into a cheap basic dev board for home automation.
      http://www.wifiezcast.com/html_products/WiFi-EZcast--Miracast-dongle-with-Built-in-WiFi-87.html

      Delete
    2. too bad there is actually no develeopment in that way

      Dongles with AMlogic or RK306 SoCs would make perfect cheap Linux hosts for IoT

      Delete

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