4. What's Inside The Fly

I want to tell you about the Fly's innards for two reasons. First, it's always interesting to see and sometimes even know how a new electronic technology is implemented in silicon. Second, I at least am amazed at how much unique computing power LeapFrog has managed to stuff into a very small space.

I was unable to open the Fly's plastic case and keep everything intact. Many of the short wire and ribbon cable connections broke. Essentially I had to sacrifice a Fly to show you what's inside. I say "sacrifice" because I am sure not going to try to solder the wires back onto the surface-mount circuit boards. My last soldering job involved building an Altair 8800 microcomputer in the mid 1970's. The Altair probably had less than 1% of the power of the Fly, but it did have gigantic non-surface mount circuit boards and components that made the assembly job easy for my gigantic hands.

The Fly has two major circuit boards, the main board and the sensor board. Before I take you on a very brief tour of the boards, I need to point out that LeapFrog would not provide any information about the boards or components. I understand not wanting to give out proprietary information, but to simply confirm the parts on the boards and provide really basic information on what they do wouldn't open the floodgates to the destruction of the company. In its defense, LeapFrog isn't a technology company used to people asking questions like this.

Given LeapFrog's lack of cooperation I can only tell you what I and some helpful folks inside and outside of TG Publications were able to glean about components by visual inspection. If you can provide additional information, all of us would welcome it.

As you can see in the photo below, the front of the main board includes a socket for plugging in application cartridges and two significant chips. The rectangular chip is an Intel 128 kb (16 kB) flash memory chip. After taking the picture, I cleaned the chip a little and was then able to see all of the numbers on it. From top to bottom, they are 128J3CT20, 54278069, Z42SLA89A. The round thing is not a chip, but some stone-hard glop that LeapFrog poured over what is very likely the ASIC chip. Removing the glop would probably destroy the chip and deface any identifying information on it. So I decided to stop there. The black plastic tube at the bottom of the picture is part of the sensor board; more about that in a bit.

Front of the LeapFrog Fly Pentop Computer's main circuit board - the board is actually about 2.5" (65.3mm) high and a bit less than 1" (25.4mm) across at its widest point