Hi Welcome to Tear Down! Tuesday Why do I look and sound a little bit different? because I'm shooting this with the GoPro Hero 2 action cam not my regular Canon HF G10 So you've probably seen the lab like you've never seen it before. This thing's got a massive 170 wide angle lens on the thing. It's huge so I thought it'd be interesting to take a look. What makes this thing tick inside? No, it's not the new uh Hero 3 Model it's it's the older Hero 2 but should still be interesting.

Let's go Woohoo! check it out! Love it! Huge wide angle on this sucker and it can also do non-wide angle as well. I've set it to 127 medium view angle so this is exactly the same shot as before. Here you go: so this is 127 and exactly the same shot again with the 90 narrow field of view. so it should be a hell of a lot different to the wide angle 170 we had at the start.

And just as another interesting comparison: I've turned my main LED lights off here up above me which you've seen in a previous video and still on 90 degree narrow angle and I just checked out the previous footage of this and there was quite a bit of noise on there with the main light on I you know, picture noise uh from the sensor so there should be even more noise in the background. now. Yes, I know you want to see the tear down, but I can't help myself doing a bit more comparison. This is back to uh, the 170 wide angle I.E the normal mode for the GoPro and once again, with my main LED light off.

So it's relatively dark here in the Uh corner without it I think you've seen previous video with the light measurements. It's only a couple hundred lucks or something like that, so there should be less noise than the narrow angle. It seems that the narrow angle mode on this thing, um, drastically uh increases the picture noise I think I Just realized why there's more noise on the narrow angle version. It's because it's probably gaining up a lot more cuz you can only see this much so there's no bright stuff in this scene.

It's all dark so it gains it right up. and uh causes that greater noise. But the wide angle you can see all the bright stuff down that end down there and that uh keeps the gain lower and hence lower noise. That's a theory.

Anyway, let's get to the tear down now. I Do love these. GoPro Heroes There's just something wonderful about a a product designed just optimized for a specific purpose and nothing more. And these are action cams.

The thing is small and light. There's no LCD on the back or anything like that. It's got an expansion uh, header of course and um, it. You know it's just designed to do the job.

It's got a low power um front panel status. LCD There's only two buttons. Very minimalist interface, but it's actually very easy to use. It's got a huge Um status lead on the front and also a status lead on the top and um on the back as well.

So matter, no matter what angle you view this thing from, you're going to see the status LED and it can be. You know the firmware is quite smart. It can be set to uh Power Up and automatically start recording as soon as you switch the power on. Ah, just really neat.

SD Card slot um HDMI um output cable um, external uh, audio, external mic USB interface and and a video and audio out. It's just really, really nice. beautifully designed. Anyway, this is not a review.

This is a tear down. There's a million reviews out there. This thing is the duck's guts. Now let's take the battery out.

It's the duck's gut guts of uh, action cams. so um, looks like we can get through four screws in there and check out inside. I Don't expect it to be hugely, you know, groundbreaking. There'll be a board or two with, you know, there'll be some flash memory, there'll be a main uh processor, and there'll be a couple of other support stuff and things like that.

It won't be terribly exciting, but anyway, you never know. Let's go and that's the thing. There's really, you know, not a lot of Hardware that goes into uh, doing something like this. It's all uh I mean you know, there's going to be a lot of Technology put into.

uh, you know, choosing the right sensor and the right lens and stuff like that. But as far as actual Hardware goes, I mean it's not, uh, rocket science to do a little camera like this and uh, you know, take the output from from a sensor and drive an LCD and save the uh, you know, do the uh, h264 compression these days and put it onto an SD card I Mean you know that was rocket science 10 years ago, but uh, these days, it's uh, pretty easy to do all that stuff. So I've got the um, got the screws out? Oh yeah, heard something crack There we go. Something's got something's got to give.

Well, it looks like we have to get this sticker off. Perhaps that seems to be holding it down? So let's yeah. let's peel that off. Tada Gonski all right now.

it should well pop open. We've got a cable and feel a cable. Tada There it is. Oh look at that.

I've got a, uh, what looks like a uh, heat sink here I Can't see another reason for that aluminium plate there. but uh yeah, we got some quite, uh, high density surface mount stuff in there, so let's see if we can get further. It looks like there's well, there's one main board standard 1.6 mm thickness in there. you can see it so it looks like what we've got in here is a secondary board down there for the expansion header.

We've got some flat Flex going over to a flat Flex connector, so we'll whip that off. We've got the microphone uh, insert up there. they've got that going over on wires I'm not sure why they decided to uh, do that rather than say integrate it um, onto the PCB here and just have it directly stick through the holes in the top of the case. I'm not sure why they've made that decision.

there was some reason for that, obviously. and uh, looks like we've got another flat Flex going over here. possibly to the um, uh, well, either to the LCD or uh, and all the sensor. So no, there's another flat.

Flex Yeah, there seems to be, uh, quite a few, so there might be another board under this one as well, but it's quite, uh, densely packaged in there I rather, uh, rather like it I Don't think they've wasted anything in terms of um. space. I Mean, they could have um, slimmed it down a bit, which is what they've done in the Hero 3 I believe which is, uh, smaller and lighter again than this one. So um, yeah, they've You know this one is, uh, they, you know they got it to Market They did exactly what they wanted, but they, yeah, they could have, uh, trimmed it down and possibly made it a bit smaller.

Perhaps we'll just leave of that up there to get our flat Flex cable out. It should just pull out now. Nice done. There's our USB connector down there.

Yeah, definitely a second board down there. of course. looks like we've got got possibly more metal work under here. Yep, there we go.

So fair bit of metal work in this thing. So all that metal work in there would be for uh, heat sinking of the Uh sensor and the processor I'm assuming because they're uh, fairly grunty little things in terms of uh, you know, through, you know, data throughput and uh, stuff like that. So um, they are going to be dissipating a little bit of power, especially in a small cas like this, and especially in one that's designed to be, uh, sealed up where the basically the heat, uh, cannot. Escape So um, in terms of uh, you know you want extra thermal mass in there? uh, because you know the heat's not going to get out through the, uh, clear polycarbonate? um, you know, underwater housing and stuff like that.

So you want this thing to still operate for a couple of hours? uh, while not overheating? So they're going to add, um, a whole bunch of thermal mass in there with those aluminium heat sinks and there you go. I Took that plate off and uh, that is the back of the sensor down in there and you can see the matching uh plate here has a has that U has that indentation which uh presses against the back of the sensor in there so it's dissipating the heat. uh, back out of there into this back plate. but of course this uh, big chunk of aluminium down in here is also going to be serving as a huge heat sink.

but they went. well. that's not enough. We need to get some out the back as well and um, uh, you know, possibly also spread that into the battery which this Uh plate is against as well.

So here's the main board and it is absolutely, uh, flooded with that little 042 uh passives. There's a bunch of resistor networks in there, there we go. you can see the resistant networks are in 7 and so forth and uh, we've got a whole bunch of Uh bypass caps. It's going to be all circuitry on the other side of the board, but there's a whole bunch of passives on there.

We've got a couple of other Uh support chips and around here we're going to have our uh lithium ion, uh battery charger and uh regulation as well around the power supply and uh, looks like there's a little. There's some sort of Uh header on the edge of the board here, possibly a uh, you know, a Um System test header or a Uh programming header or something like that for production and I'm not sure what that 10 pin part is or what it's doing, but there's a couple of um so 23s around that as support. There's another five uh, sorry, a um, six pin uh, so 23 down here? yeah, a few other, we' got a diode there. Not much else exciting happening here.

We've got an unpopulated uh header over here. j6 I'm not sure what that one's uh doing at all. Once again, maybe some sort of development uh, header or uh, programming. um, some sort of, you know, System test, uh, header connector or something like that.

but that one over there is more likely to be some sort of uh, System test connector than this one down here. I'd say that's probably uh, development or something like that left over. but there you go. There's the back of the sensor and uh, see a bit of goop down in there? they've You'll notice these metal tabs here.

They've hand soldered those on the top of the board so it joins the top and the bottom board down in there. So I hope we can get this board out without having to, uh, desolder those cuz that would be a bit horrible. but um, yeah, it's not not looking that good. and I've taken a few screws out around here and it looks like the whole thing might pop out as an assembly.

Yep, look at that. Tada Beautiful! There's our oh, there's our LCD it's hanging in there. Fantastic! So there you go. There's the front side of the unit.

You can see the main uh LED there. see one of the tactile switches. the other tactile switch is uh, on the board up there. so it looks like we've got three board Construction in this thing and it really is, uh, quite a complicated little assembly.

The flat Flex there is just sort of pushed down into there I can see a whole bunch of inductors along there. Check those out! They're quite, uh, large for a, uh, something like this. And we've got another couple more down here as well. And our LCD fully Uh custom Of course, doesn't cost you much to get a fully custom.

um LCD So that's a custom Cog chip on glass one there. you can see the chip in there. it's embedded on the glass like that has the driver. that's the uh driver for the LCD and it looks like it's just a Serial interface there.

There's some power and a couple of other lines, so that'll be like an SPI interface. um LCD or something like that that goes over to the flat FX connector over there. There's a rubber spongy rubber backing on that just holding it in place and there's a bit of bulk uh, capacitance in there with all those tanms and the lens uh, pokes out through this board and that's fixed I Can't not going to put much pressure on that, but I can't really budge that that's all integrated into the large metal uh sensor heat sink at the back there. and of course that's um, you know all of the performance and uh of this thing is of course due to the Uh sensor and the Glass lens in there, it is glass I Believe it's not polycarbonate, so uh, they're specifically chosen that.

that's why this thing gets, um, awesome video quality. So they have joined these boards together. look at this really rather annoying straps and it looks like those straps are transferring power cuz one's labeled bat and then there's a huge thick Trace coming out of there from these uh so 23s and that looks like maybe a ground um tab over there. So it looks like that's how they getting power through to the other boards and you can see the Uh battery in there I believe it's a battery I Don't think it's a super cap I think it is actually a battery sold onto the main board for the uh real time clock.

So it's interesting to see how this heat sink actually goes right through the entire thing and even right out to the SD car like it's It's got the cutout in there for the SD card, so they're really packing all of the three-dimensional space in here as much as they can with heat sinking. but that's not terribly surprising as I said before, because the heat, uh, cannot escape this thing when it's uh, enclosed in uh, one of those, um, you know, enclosed in the polycarbonate case. So really, they have to, uh, put all that heat sink in there to, uh, absorb it all and hopefully not get hot enough during the uh, full operational time of this thing. which would be one battery charge.

So they probably did a lot of uh, uh, thermal testing on this thing to ensure that it, uh, it did actually continue to perform and didn't um, overheat in the uh, sealed case over time. They might even be some temp, you know, an overtemp, uh, sensor in there, perhaps? although I've never heard of a report of a GoPro um, overheating or anything like that, but they certainly, uh, may have I don't know. um, but yeah, if you can bet your bottom dollar, a fair bit of engineering would have went into the the thermal performance of this thing. Well, yeah, I decided to Google that.

and yes, you do find reports of uh, these hero 2s, um, overheating. So there you go. That's why when you stick them in a case and the heat can't escape, that equals bad news for electronics. and I Des So a bunch of those um, board to board inter connects there and we can swing this board out like that.

I Haven't tried to take the lens off yet, but you can see on the bottom of that board they've got some uh myar or capped on uh tape there. just um, insulating, uh, all those parts in there and uh, and that power supply stuff we saw before so there doesn't seem to be much doing on there at all in terms of, uh, main circuitry. So, but we can get down onto this second board down here. and of course, it's dominated by the SD card.

But if you swing this board around, you can zoom in there. you can see a couple of unpopulated uh Footprints up on that uh, top board there and there. So I'm not sure what's uh, going on there. They've obviously left out a few parts after they've designed it.

Your guess is as good as mine. and uh, this doesn't look to be easy to get apart at all. It looks like you really do have to get that lens off to pop this board off and then separate these two. I mean I am able to wiggle that? I'm not sure if you can see right down in there, but maybe not.

but um, you can see the main chiping there and there's a dob of heat sink Compound on top of it, which uh, thermally bonds that through to the main aluminium block going right through there like that. So the main processor is under there somewhere. but can I get to it? I don't know. So there you go, you can actually see the do of excuse the overexposure on the external Parts I'm trying to get a look under but you can see that big dollop of uh heat in compound.

There's another chip down in there as well, the second one right there. You can see the Uh heat in Compound on that one as well. So there's two main two main chips down in there that are heat sunk and there we have it folks. I very bravely.

uh removed the Uh lens there and I don't I do want this thing to be operational afterwards. so I don't really want to uh uh try. you know I don't want to get dust and other crap in here but there's the bare sensor mounted on the board there so the lens goes directly over that and we have a GoPro branded device there and another one which you'll try and take a look at and you can see the lens assembly down the bottom there like that. and there's the GoPro sensor up close.

It's sort of like an LCC package sort of uh directly Reflow soldered onto that board there and lots of exposed gold as well that he that's all grounded and that helps the uh Heat sinking performance as well. So we have a GoPro branded device I'm not sure I'd have to uh clean off all the gunk there all the Heats in compound to see exactly what that is. and they've got two uh watch can crystals there which is really uh interesting. sort of hand solded and folded back down there.

I Don't know why they've gone for that instead of a surface mount option I Don't know what's going on there at all. and we've probably got some more uh power supply stuff up there probably for the internal uh core voltages and things like that. so that is pretty much the guts of the GoPro right there. and I may have found the temperature sensor there.

it almost looks like a dead giveaway. 2 L device bit of Myar or some other tape and it's wedged under the heat sink there de giveaway. and I Love the look of the lens. that's really quite nice and it just drops into that uh, part of the machined out aluminium block.

Lovely. And here you can see the Uh surface mount speaker. You can see the port on the right hand side there that uh goes through a hole in the side in the bottom of the case. and it wasn't hard to find out that that GoPro branded uh chip in there look they've even got the slogan on there be a Hero is um from a company called Amberella and it's the A5 s Uh system on chip processor and it's the H264 um, you know encoder and the whole uh works.

It's basically a uh, complete solution. um and we've got the memory uh next to it over there and um, yeah really? uh GoPro Have you know whacked on the uh, a good lens? Onto this thing, the novel, um, all of the novel packaging and uh, stuff like that. And the firmware. and uh, it's good to go no pun intended.

And here we go. Let's take a look at the data sheet for this Amberella A5s: It's a hybrid DV Camera system on chip or S it's a single chip uh H264 Codec solution for highdef hybrid DV Cameras Leveraging Illas leadership in professional encoding and low power DSP Technology: The A5s provides a unique combination of highquality digital still image processing combined with full HD video processing. Woo! There you go. Um, no compr romise, blah blah blah blah blah.

And here's the stuff we're interested in: A5s H264 codec integrates an image sensor pipeline capable of processing 240 megapixels per second uh, 1080p, 30 frames per second HD 264 video Codec and a 528 MHz Arm 11 processor. Um, and yeah, you can get a full Hardware Reference Design, Software Developers kit and all that sort of stuff with it. So there you go. Um, here's all the specs: High ISO and blah blah blah blah blah 3D noise reduction as well, motion compensated stuff and um Advanced rolling shutter compensation.

As you can see, it's got pretty much everything I Mean it does a simultaneous LCD and HDMI output. If you had the LCD backpack, it could do both at once onscreen display, read out, touchscreen support if you had a touchcreen on this thing. It also supports onchip editing and wireless um as well. but for this uh Hero 2 you had to get the wireless backpack um separately.

But the new um Uh Hero 3 has the Wireless buil in Ultra Ultra compact Bomb building materials. It's all important um as you see, but there was a lot of uh support passive uh components of course. But in terms of external chips, you saw it. It was just this main one system on chip, the A5s and two memory chips and uh, that was basically it and it claims less than 500 Ms um including the DDR memory as well.

So that's pretty impressive. And here's the Uh block diagram for the thing. and as you can see, it's uh, it's got pretty much everything um embedded into there. It's got uh L You know it's got the uh direct um sensor input from the lens.

Of course it's got regular Gpios it does um, I2s, uh audio codec DDR memory interface Nan flash memory interface It's got a couple of uarts if you want to use those. It's maybe for uh, debugging during Um system, uh, testing or you know, or development or uh, something like that. It's got a USB host interface of of course the JTAG Of course that's how you program and uh uh, test the thing and um, it's got a wireless output SD card or built-in LCD HDMI blah blah blah. It's got the real time clock built-in and uh, the image DSP sensor Pipeline and scaling and then the h264 um encoding as well with dual stream uh rate control.

Fantastic! There's a lot of functionality um built into this thing. it's you know, it's absolutely massive. so um, yeah, if you want more details, um check out the well I presume. Well, you probably can't get the data sheet actually you probably you know, got to sign NDA or something like that to get the data sheet.

and there you go. It's in. The package is a 44 pin BGA 15x 15 mm Uh designed to operate to 70 and it is manufactured using the 45 nanom process and you can clearly see the uh heat sink going right through this thing. So they've really, um, done an impressive uh systems engineering job and 3D envelope packaging for this thing I Really like it.

Um, they've done a really great job. So there you go as uh, expected. there's not, you know, a huge amount um in this thing I mean you know there's the main uh processor with some memory and that pretty much um, handles everything. but you know it was really quite nice in terms of uh construction, how they've used these uh tabs to go to get the uh power between boards and how they've jammed it all in there, and how they're able to get the uh thermal performance inside this thing so really is quite, uh clever.

And it's um, its performance is really, uh, quite, phenomenal. And of course, this thing is, uh, super rugged as well. In terms of the uh package, and it's you know, it's built, built like the proverbial brick Duny when it's uh, fully assembled and packaged because this thing has like survived. you know, um, free four drops from airplanes and stuff like that.

It's uh, it's quite famous for, uh, being a very survival device. So there you go. I hope you uh, enjoyed that tear down of the GoPro Hero 2 I Thought it was rather interesting. so if you want to discuss it, uh, jump on over to the Eev blog forum and don't forget if you like tear down Tuesday Please give it a big thumbs up.

Catch you next time. Damn now I've got to put this bloody thing back together. This thing has to go on the Canyon Copter.