Disassembling The Umax Astra Pix 670 Digital Camera
Objective: Disassemble the various components of the camera, and determine how the sensors and actuators connect to the underlying circuitry, and to each other.
Materials:
- Screwdrivers
- Umax Astra Pix 670 Digital Camera
- Camera for recording photos
Methods:
- Removed 4 screws for battery compartment
- Removed 6 screws for rest of outer casing
- Removed outer case.
- Removed 4 screws for upper motherboard (1 on side)
- Removed 3 screws for control pad micro controller
- Detached bus cables from control pad micro controller
- Removed control pad micro controller
- Detached bus cables from upper motherboard
- Removed aperture control mechanism screws
- Removed screws from lower motherboard
- Removed aperture control mechanism and remaining circuit boards from casing
- Detached lens control from plastic housing
- BONUS: Did process in reverse and reassembled camera
Data: See photos posted to OpenLab.
Results: We achieved our objective of disassembling the camera, and additionally we managed to reassemble it in the end.
Discussion: We got to compare the inner workings of our third-party product to others’ more high-end versions, and realized that ours had multiple components from different manufacturers kind of hobbled together, while theirs were single functional units.
