Axagon ADA-17 Teardown


I was looking for USB soundcard with stereo microphone input. The one I found is Axagon ADA-17. It contains only audio output and microphone input with no buttons. It has USB VID:PID identifier 0C76:1711.

ADA-17 in hand

The PCB is located inside of a semi-translucent plastic chasi that is composed out of two parts. Sadly the parts are held together by some kind of glue. Althrough, I had managed to open the chasis with only cosmetic demage, it won’t hold properly again without a glue.

Covers

The PCB contains around thrity of resistors and capacitors. Otherwise it contains only two ICs. The first is SSS1700B1, which does everything. The second chip is FT24C02A, that is 256 B I2C EEPROM.

PCB top

PCB bottom

The EEPROM is required for the chip to provide configuration. I tried to look around for specification of the memory layout, but sadly I have not found it. However with use of logic analyzer I was able to capture communication with the EEPROM chip.

Pulseview

The comunication is composed out of two parts - first there is attempt to write one byte. I assume this is check if the EEPROM is in writable mode, so it could be programmed via USB. But I have not verified this. The second part is sequentially reading every byte from the EEPROM. This is somewhat disapointing as I was hoping to see some interesting data read patterns, which could help with determining the data layout of the EEPROM.

You can download content of the EEPROM here. I had tried to determine atleast part of the EEPROM data layout and here is what I came up with:

AddressData
0x00..0x17Unknown
0x18..0x19USB VID
0x1A..0x1BUSB PID
0x1C..0x21Unknown
0x22..0x3DDevice name
0x3E..0x59Manufacturer name
0x5A..0xFFUnknown