16GB iPod Nano 3G Upgrade
2 days ago
- Project started in 2020 to upgrade iPod Nano 3G to 16GB by replacing NAND chip, despite no prior soldering or reverse engineering experience.
- Reverse-engineered the firmware, NAND driver, and undocumented FMISS instruction set to understand how the iPod communicates with NAND.
- Discovered MLC NAND caused bitflips requiring error correction; switched to SLC chip to avoid ECC complexity.
- Built QEMU emulator and disk mode patches to test and fix firmware, proving project feasibility and speeding development.
- Fixed multiple bugs, including bad block handling, allocation pool exhaustion in RetailOS, and partition table issues.
- Collaborated with community members from Rockbox IRC and Discord; code released on GitHub.
- Final result: a fully working 16GB iPod Nano 3G, with the project lasting years and leading to more hardware experiments.