Teardown by Paul Bruss

Here are the picture of the teardown realized by Paul Bruss on the Facebook group “Philips Picopix Max Group Owners”.

PS: comments are from original author (mine arrived safe and sound, with its auto-focus gear still properly attached, thanks to Philips own fix :smiley:)




Screws to remove the mainboard are highlighted in green. The two on the right side closest to the battery cable hold in another cable.
Connectors are highlighted in red.



This gear is held on with a small dab of glue. It has a lot of room to come off and rattle around inside of the case. I fixed my focusing issues by reattaching the gear and inserting some small pieces of cardboard that will prevent the gear from slipping off again, but still allows it to spin.




The gear is keyed to go on only one way.

Battery
“With great power comes great responsibility”

Bottom of mainboard.

From the looks of it, the 2+16G indicates the two RAM modules next to that are 16GB each instead of a single 32GB chip. Possibility of factory upgrades later in the lifecycle.


Top of main board







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How did you remove the plastic caps covering the screws?

A gentle pull using a thin needle inserted from the side will remove them without issues.

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Wow that voltage on the battery is high! I hope it cuts off at 12.6 volts and not 13.05 as that is really on the limits with a 16,500mah battery.

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Likely the cut off is whatever the battery IC itself is set to, which is 13.05. I doubt Philip’s engineers added more logic to lower that limit.

With such high voltage cut off, a whole bunch of these units will either be dead or have battery bloating issues, causing the casing to crack or even fire up in under a couple years.

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@Rob123, @facetime :

If the battery manufacturer marked the package with “13.05”, I would be very surprised if they had used cell chemistry that was not designed to be charged to that level. For example, with three cells in series, the 4.35 volts recommended for the chemistry in this screenshot would be a perfect match.

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Thanks for the info @Addo
If the Li-Ion battery is indeed augmented with Silicon-Graphene, then as the article indicates, the charge voltage of 4.35 / cell or 13.05v total should result in the same longevity at a standard Li-Ion cell at 4.2v.

However, the same proportionality relation to charge cycles should apply to these new cells, just shifted from 4.2v to 4.35v
image
Source: https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

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Some of the units delivered in December and January are likely already past 200 charge cycles. There would be reports already, if they had used a battery chemistry that would reach 0 capacity by that number of cycles.

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It’s really cool to see that battery tech is improving behind the scenes. In this case, it’s 10% improvement, according to your article. :+1:

However, for the sake of preserving longevity, you might want to still keep the charge to 4.2v or lower so your battery will last longer.

Choice B: 10% > capacity over standard Li-Ion
Choice A: Same capacity as Standard Li-Ion but 2x the charge cycles

Choice A seems to be the way to go on a device with a non-removable battery, at least for me.

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