Hi guys and gals, I started with my Powered Up tear down. For now I chose the non-destructive path of least resistance: For this phase I just needed a TORX T6H screwdriver: These are the internals of the train remote control. You can see the Bluetooth chip right in de middle. I might also desolder the battery terminals so I can show the backside of the print as well. I think they did a great job in designing the PCB, looks neat and tidy (although I am an CS/Informatics teacher I design / solder a lot of PCB's for one of our college research projects). So this is a close-up of the PCB: The Bluetooth chip is de CC2640 by Texas Instruments: datasheet / details. I would have used a SoC, but they created everything of their own and integrated the antenna etc. right into the PCB, hope the backside will show the traces for it :).
You also see the RGB led (D2). The 'grain circles' are the trick they used so that the knobs can be turned and the buttons will still ensure a proper reaction. For now that's it for the controller. Next up: the receiver. It needs to be a little more intricate:
- you need a motor controller (one can't directly control a motor from a microcontroller chip since motor draw too much current for such electronics and also often require a higher voltage)
- you need of course also a bluetooth chip

Not the best picture bu I focussed on making the IC's readable (and that worked quite well I think, you should be able to click on it for the larger / sharper version): So it uses an STM32F030 micro controller. I already guessed that since that is the same one they use in Boost. For the non-electronics people: a microcontroller is a computer on a small chip.
These chips are getting so powerful that their processing power and memory is approaching our first personal computers (but then for a fraction of the size, price and power usage). In fact this one is a 16 Kbytes Flash, 48 MHz CPU (my first 486 when I was a teen ran at only 25 MHz). To the left near the PU ports are two tiny chips. I assume these have to do with the output ports, but I could not trace them for now. The chip at the top right is a tiny chip by Texas Instruments for power management of the board and system. Again you see the same RGB led. Just like with the controller, to see the backside of the board requires desoldering the battery leads. That is not a problem at all but I don't want to melt the ABS below it so it requires some special care. Last up is the inside of the motor: It seems to look very much like the PF motors. It gives at least something away about the connectors: Two motor leads, two 'identifaction' leads (people trying to hack Boost suggested handshakes find place over these wires to determine what device is connected to it, but here ID1 on lead 5 is connected to lead 4 VCC (the 9V motor power) and ID2 (lead 6) is connected directly to GND (lead 3). That HL05 golden thing is a self resetting fuse, would protect the system from harm if a short / stall occurred. The other little thingy (C2) is a capacitor that tries to prevent spikes coming from the motor while running, harming the rest of the electronics (read the controller).   So this is the pinout as seen from the controller: That's it for now. I see a lot of possibilities to test the PU stuff even more. I already did some Bluetooth scanning using my iPhone, I could connect to the devices but one needs to send / receive commands in a certain way apparently so there is still a lot to do in that direction, hope LEGO will open up their commands to us, would be very beneficial for hobbyists and educators alike (I'm both ;)). Here is b.t.w. a very useful link for the software part of Boost: https://github.com/JorgePe/BOOSTreveng We will need some modifications for Powered Up, but it shares the basic principles and even the basic Bluetooth addresses.