Does ...

Article removed due to legal reasons. Sorry!

Very ...

Article removed due to legal reasons. Sorry!

EFI-X™ Dongle Autopsy [Update]

As promised here are some new infos and highres photos of the EFI-X™ dongle. If you ever wondered what's inside the EFI-X™, here you will find some answers.

I could find out which microcontroller is used for the EFI-X™. It was not that difficult. Searching for a microcontroller:

1. with a 64-Pin TQFP package
2. and USB support
3. an oscillator connected to pins 5 & 6
4. USB D-/D+ connected to pins 44 & 45

... gaves me very quickly a Cortex™ M3 from STMicroelectronics. A test with a spectrum analyser ruled out, that the microcontroller runs very likely at 72Mhz. Got a peak at 8Mhz (the resonator frequency), a small peak at 36Mhz, a strong peak at 72Mhz and another small peak at 108Mhz (72+36). So the microcontroller must be a STM32F103Rx. To figure out the exact model one must connect a JTAG debugger. The pads to do so are there. The EFI-X™ V1.0 has no ESD Protection for the USB data lines D+/D- and a simple 3.3V DC/DC converter.

The closed EFI-X™ Dongle:


EFI-X™ PCB Frontside still sealed:


EFI-X™ PCB Backside still sealed:


EFI-X™ opening the case:


EFI-X™ case opened and PCB:


EFI-X™ clean PCB with some explanations:

More info in the old post here.

Mac OS X 10.5.8 is out

Last night Apple has released Mac OS X 10.5.8. I did an automatic update via Apple Software Update (165MB). The update itself went fine without any problems.

I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.8 and Chameleon 2.0 RC2 now and have no issues so far:

• Sleep/Wakeup/Restart/Shutdown is working
• TimeMachine is working
• Bonjour is working
• Ethernet is working
• full resolution graphic with CI/QE is working