I love the concept of serial bus servos, writing them up for the Hackaday audience and designing my Sawppy rover around the low-cost LewanSoul LX-16A serial bus servo. After a few years of actual use, it’s fair to say the honeymoon period is over. LX-16A availability were unreliable even before the global supply chain crunch, and now it’s even worse. Furthermore, the hardware has some really bad failure modes. Two people have experienced failure where battery voltage (~7.4V) get sent out to the USB 5V bus, killing whatever Raspberry Pi was connected via USB. I have firsthand experience where a failed LX-16A shorted battery power to ground, blowing the fuse and required field repair in the middle of Maker Faire. Due to these problems, I intend to move away from LX-16A for future projects.

Now I’m going to open up “FAILED SHORT” servo to look inside. Maybe there’s something visible relating to its failure.

On the upside, the mechanical bits look great. The gearbox used well-lubricated metal gears throughout, and there’s a decent looking ball bearing supporting the output shaft.

Nothing has obviously failed on this side of the control circuit board. The square chip appears to be the main processor. There are four lines of markings on this chip:

HL004
642GB
2634B071
ARM

A web search found this forum thread that identified the chip as a Nuvoton MINI54ZDE, a little Cortex-M0 processor at 24MHz. If I get into playing with ARM microcontroller programming, I might be tempted to connect to the row of five pins and see if I can get a debug connection to that chip. Obviously, if I were to do this, I would use a different LX-16A that doesn’t short power to ground.

The next two largest chips appear to be identical, both labeled with:

4606
GA7N3C

A search found these to be AO4606 MOSFET by Alpha & Omega Semiconductor.

I see no obvious signs of failure on the other side of the circuit board, either. I see an ALPS potentiometer for position sensing, and a 1117-3.3 LDO voltage regulator.

On the upside, the lack of visible failure meant the fuse did its job well, blowing before anything really bad happened to this board. The downside is I have no visual indication of what went wrong. I’m mildly tempted to power up this servo without a fuse just to see what component blows up.

I have another failed LX-16A, this one “merely” stopped moving. It was still communicating with the rest of Sawppy controller system, with all diagnostics information showing OK. Except it doesn’t move. Powering the DC motor directly got me some motion, so at least the mechanical side is fine.

Given the lack of motor movement, I thought perhaps one or both of the MOSFETs have fried. But they look fine on this unit. Nothing’s obviously gone wrong with the CPU, either.

Potentiometer looks fine, and the 1117 LDO appears intact.

These two teardowns failed to provide any illuminating insight. I saw nothing at all that would explain faulty behavior of these units. Looking on the bright side, I’m glad neither of these devices went up in smoke and their mechanicals are still sound. I could still control the mechanicals by replacing these failed control boards with a DC motor H-Bridge controller like the classic L298N or the newer DRV8833. Turning them into a pair of gearmotors with metal gears and a ball bearing on the output shaft.

It’s summertime in Southern California, which means a surge of mosquito trying to harvest human blood. I do not appreciate being an excellent source of protein, and the weapon I find most satisfying for fighting back are electronic mosquito zapping paddles. Some call them electronic flyswatters but I think that’s a misnomer. At least around here, where our usual species of flies grow far too big to be caught in the mesh.

This one says “Electronic Mosquito Trap” right on the handle. There is an activity light visible through a clear plastic window, and barely readable on that clear plastic is “Little Angel”, possibly a brand. Powered by a pair of AA batteries, the voltage is drastically increased to build up a high potential difference between layers of metal meshes. When a mosquito tries to fly through those layers, they short the circuit ending their bloodsucking quest.

A household commodity made at great volume for low cost, they are practically disposable. This particular zapper was damaged when one of my vigorous swings crashed into the wall. The shattered rim of brittle plastic is cosmetic, but the mesh has also been bent so that the layers touch. It is no longer possible to build a high voltage potential between mesh layers, so it is time for a teardown before disposal.

I expected a voltage boost converter circuit within, implemented in the simplest and lowest cost method possible. I only recently learned to recognize a boost converter when I see one, and this guy certainly qualifies. Implemented with large through-hole components, it looks we have the basics of: a transistor, a coil, a capacitor, and a diode.

Boosted voltage are sent to metal layers via these wires, whose insulation was damaged during assembly at the factory. At least the plastic is still an insulator.

Indicator light wires were also damaged in assembly.

The yellow output wire was connected to the center layer of the mesh sandwich, the two red output wires (both soldered to the same point on the circuit board) are connected to the top and bottom meshes.

Learning more about boost converters is on my to-do list. After I have a better idea of what’s going on, I want to look at this circuit again. Perhaps I can make my own improvements on a mosquito zapper paddle!

I took apart an old Makita cordless drill (M651D) to take a look inside. It was very well designed and friendly to servicing, meaning it was easy to take it apart and put it back together still in working condition. The drill is still good, it’s too bad its NiCad battery packs are worn. Which made me think: what if I can hook up another battery to this drill? Since I wanted to leave the drill itself intact, I will remove NiCad cells from the battery pack and solder new wire in its place.

This is easier said than done. While Makita’s DC1414 charger and M651D drill were designed for easy disassembly and servicing, the Makita 1250 battery pack is sealed up tight. There were several YouTube videos of people taking these battery packs apart, and I can see it is glued together all around the perimeter between black and orange plastic pieces. The only way inside is to chisel apart durable ABS plastic.

Fortunately, it appears the battery cells themselves were not glued in place. So I’m going to try a different route and cut from the bottom with my Cutra Wondercutter S. This is not the safest of activities but I’m willing to cut near battery cells because of the following:

• They have no remaining charge to arc or cause problems.
• These NiCad cells have a sturdy steel can exterior.
• Even if I manage to puncture a can, NiCad chemistry is less volatile than lithium-based chemistries.

I would be very hesitant to cut near lithium-based batteries if they were 18650 (or similar) steel cylindrical cells. I would not try this at all if they were soft-skinned pouch cells.

I started with a small cut to find the depth of cut. This also gives me location of a single NiCad cell and lets me get a rough guess of where the rest of them are.

I gradually cut more and more of the bottom away. The Wondercutter does a pretty good job with ABS, cutting partially with its ultrasonic action and partially with the heat generated by said action. There’s definitely the smell of melted ABS but much more pleasant than if all the cutting were done by melting ABS with a heat knife. It does scratch the surface of cells, but didn’t come close to puncturing them.

I had hoped the NiCad cells would just drop out the bottom, but they were actually held very tightly by the base. Around the perimeter are small triangular pieces of plastic that follow the curve of each cell and wedge the entire pack in place. I had to cut all around bottom perimeter in order to remove those wedges. The final two were just inside the plastic clips that I wanted to keep so it could still be installed on the drill.

Annoyingly, those two final wedges were still strong enough to hold all batteries in place! I had to carefully cut away one wedge before I could dislodge the entire pack of cells.

These cells will go to a proper channel for NiCad battery recycle. But before that happens, I want their power contacts.

Those contacts were attached with a battery spot-welder and could be freed with some… mechanical persuasion.

Earlier I took apart a car battery charger, so I had a pair of wires handy and already designed for high amperage around 12V. I soldered them to salvaged battery contacts and reinstalled them inside battery enclosure. Reinstalled back onto the drill, it becomes a corded drill powered by wires. I don’t know what alternate power source I want to connect to these wires yet, but this hack of a Makita 1250 battery enclosure lets me supply power to an unmodified M651D drill.

A large part of the cost of a cordless drill system are in its batteries, so when this Makita cordless drill wore out its NiCad batteries, it made more sense to get a modern lithium-ion powered drill system to replace this one. Retiring it to the teardown workbench. I tackled the charger first, because I didn’t think there was much point holding on to a NiCad/NiMH battery charger when lithium chemistries have taken over. Next up is the drill itself, which is an interesting comparison to an even older cordless drill taken apart at SGVHAK a few years ago.

The drill itself still works fine. As a powerful motor and gearbox combination with a torque-limiting clutch, I think it’ll still be useful for something, so this is only a partial and nondestructive teardown in order to leave it in working condition. Thanks to excellent work by Makita designers and engineers, this turned out to be extremely easy.

One element of this ease is how this drill was held together by machine screws. Not self-tapping plastic screws, which are cheaper and easier to assemble but weaken every time they are removed and reinstalled. And those machine screws go into captive hex nuts, not heat-set inserts. Together, it means this drill can be disassembled and reassembled repeatedly without weakening. Nice!

After I removed all of the fasteners, I pried the two blue plastic halves apart. As I did so, all internal components fell out. It was startling at the time, but then I was happy to realize that it meant all internals are easily accessible and nondestructively so. Major subsystems fit together without any adhesives or additional fasteners.

I see the planetary gearbox has provision for fasteners to hold it onto the motor, but that provision was not used. It was not necessary: the drill enclosure held them against each other well enough for the drill to function. Speaking of that planetary gearbox, I see a few screws for further disassembly and decided against it. I wanted to keep the gearbox in running order, and I didn’t want the mess of lubricants all over my workbench. Someday I might take it apart to see internal implementation of high/low gear shift and the torque-limiting clutch, but not today.

Control of motor speed and direction is handled by a completely integrated unit. It has solder points for battery terminals on one end, and motor terminals on the other. It exposes two mechanical controls: one for direction, and the trigger for speed. Printed on the side is:

defond
DGT-1225A
25A 14.4VDC

I found the website for Defond and its “Power Tools” division that specializes in making such devices for other companies. I found no listing for DGT-1225A or a catalog at all, implying each product is a custom unit designed and built for a customer like Makita. More useful to me are the ratings printed on the side: up to 25 amps and 14.4V DC. This gives me the power envelope I must keep in mind if I want to incorporate this motor and gearbox into future projects. If I want to put them under a microcontroller’s programmatic control, I’ll need to use motor drivers capable of handling 14.4V * 25A = 360 Watts. Or perhaps I can rig up a different set of batteries?

Cordless drills are very convenient to use, removing the worry of power cord management. But the batteries that give them their independence from an extension cord is also their weak point, degrading faster than their mechanical parts. This Makita M651D cordless drill system dutifully served many years, but its nickel-cadmium (NiCad) batteries could no longer hold enough charge to last a work session. Replacement cartridges are available, but it was more cost effective to upgrade to more powerful and longer-lasting cordless drills with lithium-ion battery packs. Which was why this system was retired.

The least useful part of this system is the DC1414 charger, as it was precisely tuned to charge those out-of-fashion NiCad chemistry batteries. I’ll take it apart first.

The charger disassembled easily, no glues or anything annoying held it together. Which is a good thing, because in the lower right corner of the circuit board I see a fuse that requires disassembly to replace. I also see a dotted line across the middle of the board, likely marking separation between high and low voltage areas of this board. I see the logo for Tamura corporation, who Makita apparently subcontracted for this device.

The circuit board is a single-sided design, with through-hole components on the top side without copper traces. On the bottom we see a few surface-mount chips and copper traces, some quite wide for more power-carrying capacity. There is a notable gap across the middle, corresponding to high/low voltage divider line drawn on the other side.

Unusual shapes at several solder joints for high-voltage components caught my eye. In addition to the typical cone shape structure, these solder joints have a five-fingered extension from the base of their cone. Is this intentional or accidental? If intentional, what is their purpose? If accidental, what caused it to happen? I don’t know enough to make educated guesses. The plastic enclosure for this charger will go to landfill, and the circuit board will go to electronic recycle. I shift my attention to the M651D cordless drill itself.

I was given this Hardie Irrigation sprinkler controller to take apart, which I’m happy to do.

Color scheme and general design makes it look several decades old. I found nothing that could give it a definitive age, and I’ve found no information about this product online. Its lack of online presence supports the “several decades old” hypothesis.

Flipping up the lower access door we see terminals for sprinklers and a power transformer, a fuse, and two screws. Removing those screws allowed me to remove the core of the device.

Backside of the plastic control panel exposes the plastic ridges that give tactile detents to the selection knob. We also see the front of the circuit board, which has all through-hole components and no traces visible in the front.

All traces are on the back, where we also see the selection dial is not a rotary encoder. It makes actual electrical contact to individual functions.

Returning to the front, I see this is the largest chip on the circuit board. I have no idea what it is, my online search came up empty. [UPDATE: Randy identified the COP444L as a member of the COP400 family of 4-bit microcontrollers. See full comment below for a link to the datasheet. Thanks, Randy!]

The six sprinkler stations are each controlled by one of these. Online search found these to be triacs. I thought it was interesting how we have two of one type and four of the other.

The only item that interested me was the digital illuminated display. These look like old school LEDs. I understand that before manufacturing large LEDs became practical, the only cost-effective option are these tiny little guys. To make them more readable, they are accompanied by plastic bubble magnifying lenses. There appear to be provision for eight digits, but only four are populated.

I see tantalizing hint of more than seven segments in each digit. It looks like there are two center vertical segments so we can go a good “T” and other things difficult with just seven segments. Also, all of the horizontal segments appear to be split to the left and right of center vertical. This can potentially be a 12-segment digit.

However, when I applied my LED tester to various combinations of input pins, I could only illuminate each digit as a seven-segment (plus decimal point) display. I’ll salvage this bubble LED in the hopes I can decipher its secrets later. For now, I see no reason to hang on to the rest of this bulky box and will dispose of them.

I love Microsoft’s Arc Touch Mouse. It seems like one of those fancy design concepts that never make it beyond a rendering, but it is actually a real product we can buy. A Bluetooth computer mouse that is also a transformer that flattens for easy portability? I thought it was so cool, I bought one of the early versions: Surface Edition model 1592. Looking at the latest edition, I see they now have fully capacitive touch surfaces. Mine had two physical buttons for left and right click, and a touch surface in the middle to emulate a mouse scroll wheel and center button.

I would not have been surprised if the collapsible mechanism failed after years of use, but it has actually proven very durable. My problem is the forward section plastic which has degraded and oozing a sticky liquid I could not clean. It captures dust and dirt, and leaves my finger sticky after I touch it. It feels unpleasant so I don’t use it as a mouse anymore, making it an ideal teardown project.

Note: There will be some inconsistencies in these pictures. Partway through this teardown, I finally saw enough of the internals to realize I did not take it apart in the optimal order. I’m presenting these pictures in the order I should have used to take it apart.

Arc Touch Mouse has a smooth and unornamented exterior. All the legal requirements and identifiers are on a label inside the battery compartment.

Peel off that label to unveil a set of debug/test points and two T5 screws.

Removing them releases the top button surface, though it is still attached by two cables.

Disconnecting a ribbon cable and a two-pin haptic feedback connector will allow the top to be removed. I set this aside for a closer look later.

Once the top is removed, we can safely remove four screws holding a bracket for the rubber skin in place. Once freed, the flexible portion should be something we can peel off like a sock. Of course, I had already cut it apart with a knife by the time I realized this, so I’m not sure. Only the bracket itself is left visible in this picture as I had already cut the rest of the rubber sock away.

With the rubber sock removed, we can see the transformer mechanism. Holy parts count, batman! There are ten plastic segments to this mechanism, held by flexible spring steel top and bottom fastened by screws and plastic rivets. I did not expect this much complexity.

All of those parts were necessary so the mechanism can take one of two positions.

Top sheet of steel is fastened by melted bits of plastic forming rivets. The bottom is a four-sheet assembly so they could slide past each other as the mechanism curves. Under those four sheets is a long strip of copper-colored metal which is the key to how this mouse can hold one of two distinct positions. A strong magnet lives in a cavity at the end of the curvature, with two bits of steel at either end. The magnet wants to be up against one of those two pieces of steel, which corresponds to the flat and curved positions of the mouse. This is very clever! It also reminds me of another magnetic mechanism a convertible tablet used to stick to its keyboard dock.

The curved/flat transforming mechanism is also the power switch for the mouse, implemented as a tiny little thing adjacent to the magnet cavity actuated by a right-angle fold in the copper strip. I am amused that they had to make a circuit board just for the sake of hosting this surface-mounted switch.

Returning to the top plate, most of the complexity here is centered on the capacitive touch strip in the middle. At the lower right, we have a side-lit LED activity indicator. Behind the circuit board is a long rectangular haptic feedback device. Printed on this flexible circuit is the following:

Foxlink CO., LTD.
CONFIDENTIAL
Dali_Capsense
V2R1+

I infer “Dali” was the development codename for this device.

I tried to extract the capacitive touch flex circuit intact, but I unintentionally ripped it in half.

Before this teardown I had assumed the haptic feedback came from a motor with an eccentric weight on its shaft, common for cell phone vibrations and such. This device was too long to be a spinning motor, so I wanted to see inside. It was wrapped in no less than four layers of sheet metal. So thin, they were barely more rigid than paper and practically razor blades. I had to be very careful peeling them apart to find a small coil-wrapped armature between two magnets.

The mainboard of the mouse is almost boring in comparison to the rest of this device, but it does confirm the Dali name with:

Dali
Navigation_V2R0

I was surprised to see that the mouse position optical sensor is separate from its illuminating LED instead of together in an integrated enclosure. I briefly thought about removing the sensor for novelty’s sake, but these things are tiny. I decided not to spend time getting something I’ll lose the next time I sneezed.

This was an epic teardown. The Microsoft Arc Mouse is a premium product, significantly more expensive than lowest-bidder Bluetooth mice on Amazon. But I love its novel design. After seeing all its components, I’m actually surprised it isn’t more expensive. In fact, I’m surprised it got approved for manufacture at all! I wonder if mechanical engineers have managed to simplify construction of current generation Arc Mouse, but they are too expensive for me to buy one just to take apart. Perhaps someday I’ll have a chance to pick up a broken unit and take it apart for comparison.

As an electronics hobbyist, I am quite familiar with the smell of fried electronics and burnt plastic. But I usually smell them immediately after I made a mistake, not waking up to that smell in the morning. I shot out of bed looking for the source, thinking one of my projects died overnight. But it wasn’t one of my projects. The smell was coming from my TrueNAS CORE server, which was surprisingly still running. After I properly shut it down and disassembled its power supply, this is what I saw:

Not good, something got hot enough to melt a hole.

The heat source appears to be this row of surface mount resistors. While a resistor is expected to turn electricity into heat, they’re not supposed to get this hot.

There are no components on the other side of the circuit board behind those transistors. Just a few identifiers “2960323904” and “DC-3266”.

The scorch marks left inside the power supply enclosure imply they got hot enough to start burning, which was thankfully contained within the enclosure and did not turn into a house fire. Hooray for electrical fire safety regulations! However, I’m concerned at the fact that it caught fire at all, as I would have the power supply to shut down when something goes wrong. Every one of my previous failed power supplies would shut down and refuse to run again, but this one kept running merrily along even after it had (briefly) caught on fire!

There were no signs of damage beyond this vertical riser circuit board. I saw nothing I recognized as a fuse, though I’m sure there are form factors I don’t recognize. [UPDATE: I took apart another computer power supply and found it died from a blown fuse. The fuse was very hidden and definitely not designed to be user accessible. Once I found the fuse in that other power supply, I was able to return to this power supply and find its non-user-serviceable fuse as well. This fuse did not blow despite the fire.]

No sign of overheated traces on the circuit board.

This power supply had been running quietly and reliably for years, powering my TrueNAS CORE server. My Kill-A-Watt meter indicated a steady-state power draw of roughly 80-90W, which is a tiny fraction of this power supply’s advertised 650W capacity.

I don’t remember how long I’ve had this power supply, but I am confident it is well out of warranty. The only date stamp I saw was on the back of the cooling fan, with a manufacturing date of December 13th, 2011. This puts an upper bound on the age.

Random side note: I think “Protechnic” is a perfectly reasonable name for an electronics supplier company. Given this episode of combustion, though, I also note it is just one unfortunate letter off from “pyrotechnic“.

---

I don't know what this row of resistors were supposed to do, but it is clear they could resist no more. pic.twitter.com/IPWlG3mAve

— Roger Cheng (@Regorlas) July 3, 2022

In order to create a segment map for a salvaged LCD unit, I soldered a rotary knob into my Arduino circuit so I could interactively select which segment to activate. It came from this particular Amazon multipack listing (*) which was the lowest bidder that day. This knob reports rotary motion via quadrature encoding, and it has a mechanical detent for tactile position feedback. (Twenty detents per revolution of the knob, or 360/20 = 18 degrees per detent.) It also responds to push like a button. The segment map project was my first unit from the multipack, and it seems to function properly. Even better, it doesn’t “feel cheap” in its tactile sensation, so I’m happy with this particular multipack. And because it was so inexpensive, I decided to take one apart and look inside.

The entire assembly is held together by folded sheet metal. Bending its four fingers aside allowed me to separate the device into individual subcomponents. The pushbutton mechanism is at the bottom, a very simple construction where the two pins connected to two sheets of slightly separated metal. There’s a slight convex curve to the metal acting as spring. Pushing on the knob pushes these two sheets together. Overcoming the convex curvature gives us the tactile “click” of the button press and gives us electrical conductivity between those two sheets. Usage: tie one of these two pins to ground and connect the other pin to the microcontroller input pin with either internal pull-up or external pull-up resistor so it normally reads high. When knob is pressed, the pin will be shorted to ground so it reads low.

The next layer up is the quadrature encoder to report rotary motion. There are two sets of thin metal fingers that stay in a fixed position, making contact with alternatively conductive/non-conductive portions of a wheel that turns with the knob. Here is an illustration of the electrical conductivity between these fingers and their interface pins:

The center of these three pins connect to both sides. Each of the other two connect to their side of the wheel. Usage: connect the center pin to ground. Connect the other two pins as quadrature A and B signals to microcontroller with internal pull-up or external pull-up resistors.

Above the wheel is the detent mechanism. For this particular device, there is a detent every four quadrature transitions. When it is stopped at a detent neither of the two side pins are connected to ground. (high/high) When turning from one detent to the next, it will quickly cycle through the other three states (high/low + low/low + low/high. Or the reverse order low/high + low/low + high/low if spin the opposite direction) before stopping at high/high again on the next detent.

These quick transitions meant polling would not be fast enough to read this encoder. We require hardware interrupt support to ensure we don’t miss steps. As I did for the Toyota faceplate investigation, I used Paul Stoffregen’s Encoder Arduino library. This time running on ESP8266 Arduino Core instead of ATmega328, it reliably read knob transitions using ESP8266 interrupts.

(Note: at the time of this writing, the latest public release is v1.4.2 which has problems running on an ESP8266. I had to clone the repository directly to pick up at least this fix among others.)

---

(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases

I don’t know why this particular battery charger/maintainer was discarded, but I wasn’t going to hook it up to a real battery to find out. I got it from a discard pile just to take apart and look inside. It was designed to be permanently mounted under the hood of a car. When we want to charge/maintain the battery, we plug an extension cord into its stubby power cord.

Harbor Freight no longer lists item number 99857 on their site. I also note that this label (and all the warnings) would not be visible when the device is mounted.

Disassembly was straightforward with only four screws to remove.

It’s almost refreshingly retro to see a circuit board with only through-hole components. It also meant I could easily follow circuit board traces to see how much I understand. My first impression (and assumption) was that the big coil in the middle was the transformer, and I had thought it was used to step the voltage down from household 110V AC to something lower, then passed into a rectifier to obtain DC voltage somewhere near the 14.4V maximum for lead-acid battery. But I realized I was wrong when I followed the copper trace for the line voltage. (White wire.) It first goes through a nonreplaceable fuse (better than no fuse I guess) and then immediately into the rectifier. The DC output — which I guess would be above 100V DC — is buffered by a big capacitor, and I don’t understand very much beyond that. I understand a little more every time I do a teardown, so hopefully I will be able to decipher more if I return to this device in the future.

Twenty years ago, photography’s film-to-digital transition was well underway. Designers and engineers were pushing the limits of what they could do when freed from the constraint of a roll of film. The landmark iPhone wouldn’t be released for another five years, ushering in the age of everyone having a touchscreen cell phone (and an attached camera) in their pocket. This was the golden age for small digital point-and-shoot cameras, as it was between the age of film and era of ubiquitous phone cameras. In this environment Sony announced an ultra-tiny digital photo camera, the DSC-U20. Some reviewers claimed it was smaller and better than the best film cameras ever made for clandestine espionage, which sounded great but how they could possibly know?

Anyway, when I learned of it I was blown away by how small it was. I remember thinking if I took a canister for 35mm film and made it 150% as long, it would be approximately the same size as a DSC-U20. Enchanted, I had to have one despite its expense, and my income at the time allowed such frivolous purchases. It was small enough to carry every day, a handy camera years before everyone’s cell phones had a little camera.

If we looked at this device today without that historical context, one could be forgiven to think Sony just packed a cell phone camera into a case with battery and called it a day. That would be very, very wrong. It was a marvel of engineering and packaging, with electronics crammed into every available nook and cranny connected by flexible printed circuit boards. Flex PCB is something easily accessible to the electronics hobbyist today, but not twenty years ago.

The sun had since set for compact point-and-shoot digital cameras. Some people still have them and list them on eBay as “rare vintage digital camera” asking hundreds of dollars for them. Feh! Taking one apart is more fun. I brought it to the January 2020 session of Disassembly Academy at Supplyframe Designlab and a team went to work. I was running around as a co-host of the event (taking a few pictures along the way) and as much as I enjoyed sharing my love of taking things apart to see what made them tick, I was a little sad I couldn’t see every minute of this teardown.

The tiny camera took up more and more of the table as it slowly disintegrated through the night.

I took this picture at the end of the night, showing all the major subassemblies. To this day, this is my favorite picture out of all Disassembly Academy projects.

Two of the participants wanted to take a souvenir home each, a request I happily granted.

One participant took home the rear user control subassembly including the display unit. (Top red rectangle.) I had the impression that this tiny screen was one of Sony’s first attempts at a commercial OLED display, but what we saw was consistent with an LCD. Either my memory is faulty, or we have no idea what an early OLED should look like.

Another participant took home the CCD imaging sensor. (Right red rectangle.) Unlike modern cell phones with their CMOS imaging sensors, this camera had a much bulkier and power-hungry CCD as a tradeoff for better image quality.

I took home the rest, planning to take a closer look at the components later. This is the day.

This camera’s component packaging is even more impressive when taking into account of the fact that more than half of the interior volume were consumed by the battery tray (a pair of NiMH AAA recommended to sustain current draw) and a slot for Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick.

The battery terminals are connected to a power control board with many inductors, capacitors, diodes, and transistors visible. A high density BGA IC is in charge of this department.

Significantly more electronic brainpower lives on this main board, with connections to nearly every other flex PCB on the device. The largest chip has a Sony logo and, based on my past experience tearing down Sony products and encountering plenty of their proprietary components, I didn’t bother wasting time trying to look up that chip’s designation of CXD3159 304A38.

Today, white LEDs are bright enough to add light to the scene. They’re not a true flash but they consume far less power and space. This camera predated such high-powered LEDs, so it had a real Xenon flash with capacitor and its own power control board taking up precious volume for the sake of making a bright flash of light.

Here’s the tiny lens assembly, with a lens that can slide on tiny linear guides. Early cell phone cameras had fixed lenses and all the limitations that imposed. More recent cell phone cameras had lens elements that are moved with voice coils.

Not this camera! Four electrical contacts each imply this is a pair of tiny stepper motors for controlling aperture and focus.

One of the two aperture control flaps has been lost.

Focus control motor shaft has a cam for lens position, working alongside an optical end-stop sensor for lens position.

It might be fun to get these motors to run again, but I’m confident the stepper controllers I have on hand for NEMA17 sized stepper motors would instantly burn these little guys up. Even at their lowest current limited setting. I’ll wait until I get my hands on something that can enforce a lower power limit before I try moving these motors.