Boron (Mesh) with 3rd party SIM almost impossible?

While I’m waiting until my Mesh pre-order arrives I was digging a little deeper into the possibilities of these new devices.
I want to use 3rd party SIMs in these devices and just assumed that this would be an easy setup. But when having a look at the new hardware schematics it looks like this will be more difficult then first thought.

If you want to use a 3rd party SIM one needs to select channel 1 to work with the nano SIM card slot. Now instead of this being just a software selection using an IO pin for setting SIM slot selection it seems it’s done by hardware pullup or pulldown resistor.

So if I understand this correctly we need to re-solder this resistor to make use of 3rd party SIMs?
Problem is this resistor has a 0201 package, this is insane small to solder by hand :crazy_face:

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SIM_SELECT is a net connected to a u-blox GPIO, so you can control the SIM in software.

https://docs.particle.io/reference/device-os/firmware/boron/#setactivesim-

There is a pull-up, but you can override it in software. By populating the other resistor you could make the default the other way.

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I did not look further because I saw that V_INT is also powering the SIM switch IC.

Is this not a problem then? If you set V_INT low then the FSA2567MPXMLP chip doesn’t receive power on VCC. If I look into the datasheet it states a minimum of 1.65V needs to be supplied to VCC.

vcc_power

Sorry, I gave the wrong answer in the post initially (I corrected it). It is still switchable, but because SIM_SELECT is a net. R14 is a pull-up, but that’s fine because the GPIO can drive SIM_SELECT low.

sim_select

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Ok indeed thank you, waw I missed that one :sweat_smile:

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