2013-05-26

Naked hardware #7: TerraTec Cinergy T Stick Black

TerraTec Cinergy T Stick Black teardown

That stick is Realtek RTL2832U reference design. Used RF tuner is Fitipower FC0012. TerraTec has assigned USB ID 0ccd:00a9 for that device.

Device is supported under Linux starting from the Kernel 3.6.

TerraTec Cinergy T Stick Black

TerraTec Cinergy T Stick Black


Key components:

Realtek RTL2832U
Fitipower FC0012


PCB top side

Top side of PCB
Both main chips are that side of the PCB. Upper one is FC0012 RF-tuner and lower one is RTL2832U demodulator & USB-interface. Naturally, RF-tuner is near antenna connector and USB-interface chip is near USB connector. There is 28.800MHz crystal quite between the chips. It is that clearly visible metal box. It offers clock source for both RTL2832U and FC0012 - saving one crystal.

Black box, right side of PCB and near antenna connector and FC0012, is IR-receiver for remote controller.

FC0012 is direct-conversion (aka Zero-IF) architecture RF-tuner. It is very typical DVB-T RF-tuner what we could expect to see nowadays. There is four clearly visible parallel wires between FC0012 and RTL2832U, which are going through SMD resistors, that are located very near FC0012. It is baseband interface, I+, I-, Q+, Q-. That bus feeds baseband "antenna" signal from tuner to demodulator.

I am not going to explain RTL2832U features that time as I have explained those earlier. Please see older blog posts.


PCB bottom side

Bottom side of PCB
That side of PCB is quite empty and booring. The only and the one IC, marked as FM24C02A, is 2k serial eeprom. As usually it contains configuration information for RTL2832U, most notably TerraTec own USB ID.

USB interface

IDLE current drain without a driver: 18mA



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