

Teardown and exploration of Apple's Magsafe connector - kens
http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-magsafe.html

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chiph
So, the _charger_ has a microprocessor with twice the potential address space
as the 6502 in the original Apple ][ .. Wow

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kens
Yes, it's amazing the processing power that can be tossed into something like
a charger these days. (The address space doesn't scale like that, though, and
the 6502 had a 16-bit address bus.)

The charger microcontroller is in the TI MSP430 family; it's custom so I don't
know it's exact properties. It probably has just 1 or 2K of flash and 256
bytes of RAM. But it's much faster, with a 16MHz processor, compared to 1MHz
in the Apple II. This chip monitors the output voltage and current to handle
power up and fault shutdown. It doesn't do the actual switching power supply
control; there's a separate SMPS controller chip for that. And the 85W charger
has another controller chip for power factor correction. It all seems a bit
over-engineered to me.

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mosqutip
Very cool! I wonder if everything holds about the same way for the new
'L-shaped' connectors?

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kens
I read out the ID from an L connector and its basically the same. The circuit
board must be slightly different since the wire comes in from the side but its
the same 1-Wire device inside. I'm reluctant to sacrifice a charger to tear
down the L connector just to see though.

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mosqutip
Predictable enough, but who knows.

