Novena in the X-Ray

Last week, Nadya Peek from MIT’s CBA gave me the opportunity to play with their CT scanner. I had my Novena laptop with me, so we extracted the motherboard and slapped it into the scanner. Here are some snapshots of the ethernet jacks, which are enclosed metal boxes and thus a target for “intervention” (e.g. NSA ANT FIREWALK featuring their nifty TRINITY MCM).

Plus, it’s just fun to look at X-rays of your gear.

The X-ray reveals the expected array of ferrite cores implementing the transformers required by gigabit ethernet.

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4 Responses to “Novena in the X-Ray”

  1. F4GRX says:

    hah, an extremely fun opportunity you got!

    I would have expected a better contrast from the PCB traces.
    You probably had to sent a “massive” dose to get through the ethernet jack shielding.

  2. Stardust says:

    Hey, I had a question about Novena, wasn’t sure where to post it.

    For a long time I’ve been wanting an open platform to perform heavy computations like graphics rendering and various other stuff, in a distributed fashion.

    Novena caught my interest but it’s a bit too much for my application. For instance, I don’t need a screen, microphone or accelerometer.
    I’ve taken a look at the crowd supply page and I found novena to be a bit costy for my use case, especially when I don’t need some of its features.

    So I was wondering if you had any plan to design sort of a “server” version, which would only have the necessary features for computing and network applications. Does that sound like something that might happen?

  3. spacedog says:

    cool pics, congrats to you on the successful crowd funding of novena.

    SD.

  4. RH says:

    While analysingthe novena (parts), did you decap the SoC or other chips, just to examine if there would be unexpected function blocks on them? Giving the high integration, it would be a needle and haystack type of problem, but maybe an unexplained block, not described in the datasheet, could be found by accident…