Tear down, inspection, and upgrade of Android head unit For the Chevrolet Cruze Gen 1
Welcome! After purchasing this unit:
8 Core 4+32 Android 13 Upgrade Car Radio for Chevrolet Chevy Cruze 2009-2015
Finding the connectivity performance of this device to be OK for not amazing I decided to take it apart and see what could be upgraded to improve connectivity. Be warned this will break the warranty sticker on the unit and void any warranty you may have on the unit.
Starting out let’s list out the major networking options that this device has:
Bluetooth – Performs fine, can’t think of anything to do for it so we’ll move on from there.
WiFi – Very limited range and doesn’t seem to get consistent connection, drops randomly.
4G Cellular – One of the few options I’ve seen with both 4G capabilities and SIM slot, this does not perform well at all out of the box.
Let’s see what we are working with now.
On the back of the unit we can see that the main board is held down by screws put through the heat sink. We can unscrew them with a PH000 screw driver bit (Circled in red).
!!!!! NOTICE !!!!!
Following this guide from here on will more than likely void any warranty you may have on your unit and break the quality control seal attached to your unit. If you follow this guide further make sure you understand this before you continue.
From there we can remove the compute unit from the screen and assembly. Be VERY careful, there are delicate ribbon cables connecting the LCD and other components, not to mention, doing this will void your warranty by breaking the sticker on the side of the unit.
The power connection comes out with a little pressure (Circled in red), where the ribbon cables are held in place with a fold down latch mechanism (Circled in yellow). Flip the black levers on the latch up and it will free the ribbon cables, you can easily slide them out from there.
Now we can separate the compute module from the heat sink, there are five screws that hold these together (Circled in red), keeping the same PH000 bit we can remove the five screws and push gently on the fuze and screw on SMA stands for the antennae, this will disengage the compute module, be sure there is something under it to catch it and remove it slowly.
Here we have the main brain of your unit. The first things to note are that there is no fan, even though there is a fan port in the heat sink (Shown below), considering the size of the module and the heat it is going to produce I’m going to be installing a small fan, we will get to that later, remember, in almost every case, active cooling for electronics is better than passive cooling.
On the unit itself it looks like we have a soldered in WiFi antenna, it points out the back of the unit with a very small antenna that just barely clears the heat sink. The wireless signal must go through the metal heat sink surrounding the antenna, the unit itself, and deal with the steel cage of the car’s frame all around it, this would explain the poor WiFi performance, the antenna is essentially broadcasting into a maze of metal that makes it difficult to communicate.
There are two installed SMA terminals for a 4G antenna and a GPS antenna. There looks to also be a port on the PCB for another SMA terminal designated for -4G, for anyone who hasn’t worked with these before most cellular antennae work in a pair at different angles/polarities to pick up signal more effectively, since it looks like the device is set up to accept another antenna we’ll be adding another SMA port later to install it’s secondary 4G antenna.
There is a built in SIM slot on the board, through the proximity to the hot CPU area is not encouraging, I’ll stick to using the extended SIM port that comes with this model, that way the SIM will receive less heat and be less prone to damage.
I’m not seeing a fan power port on this device, so it looks like we’re going to have to hijack the power our future fan will need from another unused or used pin, depending on what we find.
The board looks to be a JCY2420, L837S_L830S_8035_VER_D_230112_ER4
I’ll use this later to find the wiring schematic and find which pins provide what power for our fan upgrade later, worst case we’ll use a multi-meter to find the power rail we need to tap in to. Along with a thermal laser gun to find the hot spots in the unit.
For now let’s list out the upgrades we’ll be performing:
1. Installing two new SMA edge connectors – This will replace the WiFi built in antenna with a port to connect an SMA cable and higher quality antenna outside of the metal maze that is the center dash.
2. Run SMA cables to better spot for 4G and WiFi antennae – This will be the last part, routing cables t through the Cruze dash and over to the driver’s side to both give better reception of outside signal and signal inside the car.
3. Thermal redesign – This will include finding the power rails I will need to tap in to for a fan, as well as some copper heat sinks and thermal adhesive on to the CPU, RAM, and any other components our thermal laser shows as higher temp zones.
In the coming weeks once I get the parts and information I’ll update this as I go. Anyone interested thanks for joining in the journey.
