Late 2002, I bought a Microsoft TV Photo Viewer from Tiger Direct while buying some others, more needed, computer related geek toys from them. I did not really know what I was going to do with this device, but it was very cheap ($20 if I remember correctly), and I thought that the floppy drive alone was worst the price.
Some time back, Microsoft introduced the TV Photo Viewer as a way to view digital pictures on a TV without the need of a computer. This was especially targeted to grand parents of geeky kids. Instead of sending real pictures, we could now send them a floppy with a a few 10s of pictures on them. Just popping the floppy in the drive of the TV Photo Viewer was enough to get a slide show on the TV. The unit comes with a remote control so this is extremely easy to use. The concept was neat, but it looks like the product did not sell well, and is now being discounted on Tiger Direct for less than the cost of the parts.
After playing for a few minutes with the unit, I knew I was not going to use it for its intended purpose. I could see this to be useful for sales people that do not want to carry a laptop to give customers a presentation. Carrying the TV Photo Viewer and floppy with the presentation slides would be just fine as long as there is a TV set at the presentation location. Cool, but I am not a sales person, and I already have a laptop! :-)
As I already mentioned, for the price I paid, I've received some pretty neat hardware:
A nice power adapter: AC/DC Adapter, Class 2 Transformer, INPUT: 120VAC 60Hz 17.2W, OUTPUT: ^VDC 1500mA.
An infrared remote control with 5 buttons: power, auto, rotate, back, and forward
The TV Photo Viewer device with a 1.44MB floppy disk drive (black), and a pretty nice case.
But, I was wondering if this cool device could even be cooler, and if there was inside a microcontroler that could be reprogrammed. This would be a very cool toy.
So, I flipped the unit on its back, and with a screw driver, I removed the 4 screws. After a few seconds...
After a few seconds, the enclosure was opened, and I was able to see the PCB of this device.
So, now, can we hack this thing? Can we reprogram its CPU? Can we run Linux on this Microsoft product (huh... a little bit too much excited here :-))?
The short answers seem to be: No, no, and no. The main CPU is a Zilog Z180, a glorified Z80 (8 bits CPU) with UARTs, and all on the chip. The code for this CPU is in a CMOS EPROM soldered on the PCB. So, the TV Photo Viewer has not been designed to host other applications.
Let's have a more detailled look at the parts in the Microsoft TV Photo Viewer. The following (blurry) picture shows the detail of the PCB. I did some annotation to give specify the chip names. Note the yellow marks I added on the top left hand side of the Z180. There are 3 testpoints there named TX, GND, and VCC. This is likely to be a debug serial output for insite testing.
Here is the details of the most importants chips:
U1: Xilinx SPARTAN XC2S200: This is a FPGA. This customized chip handles the processing, as the Z180 is unable to do things like JPEG decoding, and TV output.
U2: Zilog Z9L18020VSC Z180 MPU: This is the CPU handling the IO.
U3: Texas Instruments 16C945K: Infrared decoder.
U4: Holtek HT27LC020-12, CMOS 256Kx8-Bit OTP EPROM.
U5 and U6: Samsung K4S161622D-TC70: 16,777,216 bits synchronous high data rate Dynamic RAM organized as 2 x 524,288 words by 16 bits.
U7: Analog Devices 8052AR
U8: Analog Devices TxDAC AD97708AR
U18: smsc FDC37C78: Floppy Disk Controller.