Tearing down a Kaiser Bass X200 Action Camera

Today we're taking apart a Kaiser Bass X200 Action camera I took on a hiatus to Europe and Central Asia for a few months. This camera has been through the wars it's been used in in Kazahk sand, Turkish water and Mongolian dirt. It was great for taking photos, however it's video quality was terrible. Video quality was similar to 240p with a non-constant frame rate.

Housing

The first step as usual is to tear into the housing. Firstly the lithium ion battery (3.7v 900mAh, 3.33Wh) was removed to find the opening point of the housing.  This exposed an easy place to pry the face-plate from the main body of the housing. 

With the face plate removed, this exposes four corner screws, a power button PCB, and a small coin shaped speaker down the side of the camera. The screws are removed to reveal the LCD screen and motherboard.

 The LCD screen is slotted into the housing. There is a highly diffuse sheet light guide (backlight) behind the LCD screen illuminated by three right angle LEDs beside the ribbon cable.

The Motherboard

Power

The top of the PCB is likely the power supply part of the board where we can see an inductor and an 8SOIC boost converter, which steps up/down the battery voltage for the various circuits on the rest of the board. The chip with the CNVL marking in the top left corner is a low voltage detector. This chip will actively output a high or low signal whenever the input voltage drops below 3v, to protect the device from brown out related failure. I assume many of the capacitors in the top part of the PCB are decoupling caps for the main MCUs power supply input.

The Smarts

The ribbon connector in the centre of the board is for the LCD screen. The PUYA 8 pin IC on the mid-left side of the board is flash memory for the MCU likely required for storage of images before they are transferred to the SD card and just extra memory for the program running on the MCU. The SD card slot is obviously nestled down the bottom beside the two LEDs.

If we now flop over the PCB we can see the microprocessor with the GPCV5168B… marking. I could not any datasheets for this MCU but assume it has an ARM processor or similar. To the left of the processor we can see three pins protruding to make contact with the Lipo battery. It is clocked by a 12MHz crystal oscillator just to the right of the MCU. There are a bunch of unpopulated footprints for other potential models/versions of the PCB with different MCUs. Or these could potentially be for redundancy for when the MCU goes EOL they can easily just populate with an alternative part with similar specs. Hidden behind the lens we have a MEMS microphone and two separate ports for USB mini and micro connections. To the right of the USB connector we can see a small antenna trace which likely connects to an IC for a different WiFi or Bluetooth enabled version of Kaiser Baas.

The Lens

The camera lens module was mounted to the PCB using double sided foam tape. This double sided foam tape would have helped dampen any small vibrations applied to the camera. Without getting destructive presumably within the lens module we would find a CCD. Often these cameras can have small stepper motors inside to help adjunct the focus of the camera dynamically.

The End

I haven’t discussed all the little black box ICs in the PCB, but many of them would’ve been ya classic transistors, regulators, or other similar devices. It was all easy enough to put back together apart from inserting the LCD screen ribbon back into its connector, small fiddly tweezers were required. This device is going straight into the bin anyho, it is a very cheap design costing cerca $70, so you get what you pay for. I wouldn't recommend buying one, but it was fun and eay to take apart and put back together.