He obtained a recycled logic board with the Touch ID sensor included and installed the display, the battery, the back casing and other components bought in Shenzen.
He explained:
I’ve been fascinated by the cell phone parts markets in Shenzhen, China for a while. I’d walked through them a bunch of times, but I still didn’t understand basic things, like how they were organized or who was buying all these parts and what they were doing with them.
So when someone mentioned they wondered if you could build a working smartphone from parts in the markets, I jumped at the chance to really dive in and understand how everything works. Well, I sat on it for nine months, and then I dove in.
“I really wanted to solder my own logic board, but this turned out to be a much larger endeavor than I thought,†he said. However, it was easier to buy a logic board with the processor, flash storage, Wi-Fi and LTE chips and other components on it.
He also purchased a broken screen from a phone repair booth because he had “an incredibly hard time†trying to buy a bare LCD and the digitizer. The screen was completely disassembled and then reassembled with new parts.
IHS pegged bill of materials for the 16GB iPhone 6s Plus at $231.
Source: Strange Parts
