WAAAAaaaay back in Janurary, I started this project. Tonight, I finally finished it – well, I got one of the several cameras hacked.
Just a reminder, one of the guys at my PHP Meetup handed me a few Walgreens Digital Cameras, and some parts and said he can’t solder well enough to give it a try.
Well, it has been sitting on my table for the last 2 months because I couldn’t find my desoldering tools. While blogging about it last time, I remembered where they where. In my RC car stuff, and not in my electronics hutch where they should be. So tonight I dug it out.
Well, tonight I desoldered the card on the camera. I thought I had broke it when the card came off with a click. I only lifted a single trace, which is pretty good for not having done surgery on electronics in years. I had to tweak all the pins on the memory card socket, as they didn’t quite reach right. I also had to do a ‘stupid’ soldering job for 2 of the pins, as they simply didn’t line up with where they needed to go at all.
Here is the very first photo I took with the camera. I was trying to see if the memory card I first grabbed was good. It appears it wasn’t. I tried the 2nd card in the computer first. The computer could read it. The camera could too! Here is my poor, neglected fish tank in the computer room. The camera takes 1280×1024 pixel images. The date is WAY off on the camera, back in 2001, with no way to change it on the camera that I see.
This is the second photo I took. This is a photo of my computer with the card reader with the bad card in the slot.
This is a pretty cool project, it is self-documenting. Here are the spare parts from this project. 1 Daughter card, 1 card bay cover which can’t be used because it’s not hinged, a couple of peices of tape that probably helped seal up the imager, and 2 screws that held the daughter card in.
I had a terrible time with trying to get the power switch to work with the cameara back together, so I had to ‘adjust’ that area by filing the slot the switch-slide operated in. It now turns on and off fine with that extra play in the switch.
