XDK Slim Sidecar Teardown - By XboxSurgeon

Here is a teardown of the very rare XDK Slim Sidecar. These are very rare to get due to the high price Microsoft charges the developers. The Slim sidecar is much different than the original XDK sidecar in the sense that not only is it smaller but it's able to be used by multiple consoles in a development environment making it much easier and cheaper on small dev groups. This has been taken apart by me and only me.

 

I thought porn wasn't allowed on this site? This is great stuff KILLERHEDAKE! Thanks very much! It looks like apart from the connector, that board is using all retail-ly available parts, I'm surprised it hasn't been cloned yet

 

Lol, thanks. I think if more got into the wild, it may be cloned in the future. I did trade one to someone in Taiwan that was looking to do something like that, so maybe someday.....

 

If you don't mind saying how did you end up acquiring so many of these Sidecars?

 

Awesome work,also I stickied your thread.

 

Wow, thanks. I really appreciate that.

 

Congrats mate, might spark some interest in the 360 modding section

 

On the old sidecar, as most of us know, the sata cable and dvd power cable are fed from the motherboard to the sidecar and backdown as well as having a separate power cable to power the sidecar itself. If these lines are interrupted the dvd drive would fail to operate and you would have to replace the cables with those from a retail console. With the slim sidecar the lines aren't interrupted if the sidecar is removed, and the drive functions with or without it. Same functions as before with dvd emulation. Comparing the old to the slim, the top board was removed since the memory is in the bottom of the slim. The middle board is what we see here while the bottom board is actually inside the slim XDK itself. Here is a shot of the internals of the final slim XDK

 

This took long enough!

thanks for the share..Finally some light on them

 

No problem.

From my understanding they have a $2000+ price-tag (not 100% on this ridiculous price) per sidecar when purchased by development groups. Because of this, a team would only buy one...maybe two. But even then, not many make it into the "wild". As of now, I do not know any others in the "wild" that were not part of my six. I now have only three left.

 

Great stuff man!

 

The Price tag is must why they are transferable between kits, so if kit 2 and 3 need dvd emu, then kit 7 and 8 needs it next, then it can be transferred.

Any chance you can get the dimensions on the sidecar, I want to create one with a 3D Printer?

Thanks

 

Nice stuff.

You're right about the price.





I embedded the image - assembler

 

Nice document there, I had not seen that out before.

 

I cannot wait till more of the finals become available, definitely like the newer sidecar design.

 

Been seeing the finals more and more in the wild.

The problem with the slims will be greater than the problems with the old school sidecars. Now when people are trying to find complete kits, the sidecars are usually tampered with (the white test kit sidecars will most likely have the pix port opened) or they are missing having been removed for one reason or another. Tracking the sidecars down has always proven a challenge. Now since they are purposefully removable and scarce due to necessity and overall price, they are going to be even harder to track down.

 

Was curious and digged some datasheets:The Cypress USB ic CY7C68013A-128AXC: http://www.cypress.com/?mpn=CY7C68013A-128AXC Datasheet: http://www.cypress.com/?docID=45142Xilins XC2C256 CoolRunner-II CPLD http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds094.pdfAltera Cyclone III EP3C10F256C7N FPGA 182 I/O 256FBGA http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/cyc3/cyc3_ciii52001.pdf A Marvell Technology Group ic, size like a hdd main ic, Hdd emulation?Some ram, cant see partnumber or fab. (cache for the Marvell ic?)ST NandFlash ??? properbly stores code for the fpga and or other parts like the Marvell.A few pictures of the missing IC's and we have a fun time (and we cannot rebuild this, but maybe replace some ic when broken (like ram or marvell?) dump the flash... for what use?) anyway, had fun searching.

 

Interesting stuff, thanks for cracking one open to show us the guts!