Hi welcome to Tear Down Tuesday I uh Promised this little uh, tear down and you saw it in the mail bag. It was sent to me uh, but from someone from Sovo and uh, veteran I believe it was uh, from Sovo? that's his email address anyway. so thank you very much. It's a seaman camera uh for an S55 Seaman mobile phone and uh, you know I mean it's you.

Really do not see these things these days anymore. I mean what vinty? You know it's not that old in the schem of things, but the pace of mobile phone technology has meant that something like this was obsolete before it even started. So let's crack it open, see what's inside Now there's only one visible screw on this thing which is on the end here. so let's see if we can take that out and maybe get inside this sucker.

I Might have to get my spudger out and uh, no, there we go. That's that's all it took. Oh, there was a second. Looks like somebody else.

looks like somebody's already taken it apart. So let's crack this sucker open. Maybe get the spudger in there helps. There's obviously a clip.

I Don't need this sucker working anymore. Never owned a Seaman's mobile phone. Actually, maybe they're big in Serova I Don't know Tada Here We Go There It Is And the first thing you notice of course is this, uh, massive cap here and uh, what is that I hear you ask? Well, it's obviously um, the charging cap for the flash because these, uh flashes. These bulb flashes require a very high um, amount of energy and in, you know, in a very short amount of time, very high discharge Uh current.

So you get that from storing all the energy, build charging it up in a cap like this and then discharging it Wham straight into the Uh Flash And then that's why these things have a cycle time. They take a, you know, they might take anywhere from, you know, a second up to 10 seconds to actually recharge. and the main board is, uh, pretty simplistic that looks like a Linear Technology logo there I don't actually know what the part is. we' got so 23 device passives and uh, not much else in here at all so we'll have to flip this over.

Here's the lens. uh, obviously for the Uh CCD sensor and where got the viewfinder down here? which is just a crappy bit of uh, that, probably not even glass, probably just plastic and uh, the and the Flash in there with the reflector. So I took off a couple of screws and looks like the whole kitten Kaboodle drops out. Hey, we got some interesting stuff on the bottom here.

Clearly, there's a second board down the bottom. What's our cap in there? It's a 33, 330, 330 volt 60 Microfarads photo flash. It's specifically designed for photo flash applications. I'm just curious to see if there's any uh charge on that at all here.

Let's have a look n there's nothing but uh, if you were mucking around with these things and you had already charged up that cap, that could be, uh, quite dangerous. So one way to do that is if you got a meter like this and with a low Zed um setting, you know that's only got a couple of K input impedance, you can actually use that to discharge a cap like that. I Think there's quite a bit of electronic goodness in this thing, and it is, uh, quite an interesting, um, sandwiched application. You can see the main Seaman phone connector here and it's got ribbon cable going down to the bottom here, as well as up to the top.

So that's split between the two boards. and there seems to be several other things split between the two boards. so try to wedge these together and we've got some ribbon cable going from board to board here. and uh, it's quite a little interesting.

uh, engineering design exercise in trying to fit all this into. um, you know, a a package like this? Of course, modern, uh, mobile phones? are you know, extremely simplistic compared to this. But back then, this was, um, pretty much the only way to do it. and this might have been an Innovative uh camera attachment for its time.

Probably the first uh camera, uh mobile phone. So this was the first time that they were able to, uh, you know, actually do this thing so they had to shrink a regular Uh Camera application down into you know, a Um with the photo flash and everything When you've got a big photo flash they use LEDs uh these days, but um on Modern mobile phones. but back then you know, just a big the big cap in itself and the photo flash. and they decided to put in a tacky little viewfinder because that's what people were used to.

But they, yeah, the engineers have done a really good job to sandwich this together. It's it's rather interesting and the main processor an NEC probably a custom chip d6400 F1 I have uh, no idea if you have any info on that, let me know. some sort of image processor or something like that IC 501m U yeah, probably like a Serial E Squ prom perhaps? not sure. Got a crystal down there and couple resistor packs around the place, couple of five pin so 23s and not much else and clearly some uh, firmware in the device and it's got the firmware number written on it now I Took out three uh screws on the top here holding this top board in place so hopefully it will.

something will come apart. Yeah. I Don't expect that to come apart, come apart easily cuz it's wet wedged together. There's our sensor.

Ah, we've got our sensor on the bottom, directly on the bottom of the board and uh I don't know I Still can't seem to. looks like we're stuck with the Seaman connector on the end here. I might have to. uh, might have to trim that off, maybe? Yeah.

So what I've done is just snip those two bottom bits down there. and Tada there's the CCD sensor and uh, there's another device on the bottom, probably a memory when it's got some copper shielding tape over it. That's rather interesting. but uh, look at, you know the amount of work that they've put into all this custom plastic and into.

You know they've all integrated it here with the cap. That's a hey, you know, that's a fairly extensive system engineering, you know? um Enterprise there and how they've strapped. Looks like they've sort of, maybe, sort of. you know.

And they've cat for the flash device there. and they've integrated the viewfinder into all that plastic and the lens and everything in there to line up with the hole in the board on the bottom and to sandwich that all together. It's ah, it's a rather clever piece of, uh, three-dimensional system. They just broke an inductor off there.

oops. Rather interesting bit of three-dimensional systems design there. I Like it, it's brilliant. and uh, this can be a really, um, one of the more difficult aspects of Uh engineering actually just packaging the multi-disciplines that you have to have to package something like this all together and uh, you know, and get it out in a reasonable, uh, time frame.

You've got to have the mechanical, um, experts, the plastic, you know, packaging experts. You got to have marketing involved of course and you know. And then the uh, the PCB layout guys and the designers. and you know, the circuit designers and everyone involved in this thing.

you'd have you know the Optics uh people involved in all that sort of stuff. So there's you know I wonder what sort of uh, what size team? um put this thing together but you know it, it seems. You know it's a fairly simplistic application in the end, but to put all that together is quite a bit of design work. My hats off to them.

It just goes to show that even the simplest everyday consumer items like a little camera attachment for you know, probably the first camera attachment for a mobile phone. Just what you know, there's a quite a big Uh design team that's put you know, you know, a year of their life, nine months, or a year of their life into designing this thing, let alone something you know hideously more complex like the old uh style, uh, you know camcorders or something like that which are a massive you know amount of product engineering which goes into those. This is just you know what's involved in a simple camera H makes you think, doesn't it I don't know who or what scan hex is with a K uh, maybe it's the maybe it's the subcontract design company who did it I don't know. but it's the MB 35s and it's a REV 1.0 and what you know I Just looked up the camerapedia on Google and Scanex is a um a company which makes yeah Digital Imaging devices and cameras.

They're a Taiwanese company. founded in 1997, they work in the uh, the Silicon Valley area of uh Taiwan and um, they uh produced at one point in 2000 in early 2000s. uh, 150,000 cameras a month? go figure. And it looks like we have a date code here the 16th week week um 2003 and this is probably the best zoom I'm going to be able to do on my video camera here, but that is the CCD sensor chip, the D there and uh, it's You know it's directly exposed.

there's a like a glass uh top on there. that's you know there's well, I assume it's glass. Yep, there's a glass top on there so it's not like I can penetrate that so you know that helps keep out dust and uh, keeps it fairly robust. Uh, during manufacturer.

So why they've got that copper tape over the uh one of the memory devices there I I Don't exactly uh, know it's shielding for something. Maybe it's the photo flash discharge or something like that. perhaps? I'm not. uh, entirely sure.

So there you go. That's a tear down of the Uh. one of the world's first Uh mobile phone camera attachments for the Seens: S55 and of course, uh, there's no like focusing mechanism or anything for this lens. It's just a a fixed uh Focus lens.

You can see it's just glued in there around there so that you know there's nothing fancy there at all. There's no Zoom just uh, just a fix Focus Um, you know I don't know if it's even a glass, uh lens. You know it could be like a simple Polyc carb lens or something like that. I Hope this comes out I'm attempting to film handheld with my compact camera through the Ey piece of my Times 80 Olympus SED microscope here and hopefully that's in focus and you can at least see the CCD There's the Uh CCD substrate itself and the Uh.

All of the Uh senses all of the pixel elements in there and then the surrounding circuitry around the CCD sensor. so hopefully that's in Focus You can see the bond wires going off there as well. The bond wires go off to the PCB substrate which goes out to the or guess what you call the PCB substrate going off to the Uh pins of the package. but there's some uh control circuitry inside there.

It's rather neat. That's the highest magnification I've got here and you'll notice that with my Uh I've got my X 2 barow lens under there and my X 10 I pieces and my times uh for zoom on here so that gives a total uh Zoom of 80 times and you'll see the very small working distance I've actually, uh got here. It's really, uh, it's really tiny. the lens is, um, up there a bit, uh, further from there, but you know we're only talking about 25 mm working distance or something like that under this microscope with that times 2 barow lens.

So thank you very much veteran from Sovo for sending that in. That was rather interesting. There's you know, there's a lot more to it, but there's uh, you know, I can't really, uh, tear down that uh sucker any further really. But so it's only a really quick, simple tear down, but lots of nice interesting system engineering going into that and it's almost a shame for something that, uh, you know, really didn't have a long, uh lifespan I Don't think these sort of things would have only last a year or two and then disappeared completely from the market until they were, uh, replaced with the um, you know, like the Seos uh camera uh sensors and the lead flashes and things like that inside your regular mobile phones as you know them Today.

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