It makes me want to make glasses that have these
cameras, like, here, or like, maybe, like, on my forehead.
Maybe, like, maybe like, this.
Today, I'm going to be doing a tear down of the
Insta360 ONE R. It's a new action cam that is modular.
So the idea is that you can swap out different
camera modules. You can turn the screen around so you can
do selfies or turn around the other way to film
other people. I'm really curious to check this out.
Uh, Insta360 gave me this demo unit when I, uh, met with
them at CES and I've been dying to unbox it
but I didn't want to do it without you.
- Whew, whew. Boxes have some suction.
Oh, that's pretty. This looks like the standard, uh,
wide angle lens.
So this, is now the 360 module.
Let's dive in to taking this apart, but, don't worry,
if you want to see this camera in action, I made a separate
video trying it out and doing a bit of a review.
I'll leave a link to that video down in the description
and, uh, I'll mention it again at the end of this video.
Let's see, let me get these out,
here.
Okay. And then,
grab a pry tool.
I guess go into these seams here?
Well that's not working. I suspect because
this thing is waterproof and because every individual
module needs to be waterproof, ah, I suspect that
there is a lot of adhesive in this.
So, I might just have to resort to, uh, my hot air gun
to uh, to heat things up and try to pry them all apart.
Oh, I wonder, I wonder if this plastic front cap
is gonna get under there.
Oh, yeah, okay, that works.
Try to get a plastic...
pry tool,
okay.
That's workin'. Ah, okay, yeah, totally.
Those must be screws underneath.
Is that screws under, like, potted under this adhesive?
Yeah, okay, yeah I kinda see screws through that. Okay.
They have squirted epoxy on top of the screws
which is super annoying and it works really well
for manufacturing and waterproofing; not so well
for repair. So, I'm gonna have to figure that out.
Okay. So, I'm just gonna put a little bit of heat right
on those screws.
See if I can get that epoxy out. Alright so, get it out
with the tweezers here.
Oh yeah, that'll work. I can feel it loosening up.
Oh, yeah, there we go.
There we got it going on here,
oh, okay, this is cool.
Alright, so that was just a metal frame over the top,
now we have that 360 camera module. We got this, like,
Wow,
this is
a
rigid flex module it looks like.
So, this, this, circuit board here is actually
bonded directly to this big complex ribbon cable.
That is pretty neat.
I'll see if I can get this out of the enclosure.
I think I have to do the other side.
Hang on, one more screw.
Alright.
Oh, the sides are off, oh and this all just kinda comes
apart.
Oh wow!
(laughs loudly)
Look at that!
These are completely separate modules that just
have their own connectors.
Yeah, one connector per camera. Cool.
Let's take this apart next, because I think,
I hope, it's gonna go similar.
(gentle laughing) Alright.
It screws out, boy,
what to do with this one...
Take it in here,
(noises)
Will it go? Gotta find those screws again.
Where are the screws on this one?
This is hard plastic.
Then, there's a rubber strip.
Then that, yes.
No?
Jeez.
Alright, well. My best guess is, uh, glue.
These end caps are glued on.
Then, he sliced his hand off with he prying tool.
It's not pretty, but we're getting in.
One way or another.
I'm sure plenty of you are cringing by now, I am too.
Oh yeah, it's massive amounts of adhesive.
This whole back is glued on.
See that?
Okay.
Adhesive, adhesive adhesive.
Where are the screws?
Let's try heating this up in a more broad fashion.
It's getting warm.
It might help me with adhesive, we'll see.
Yup. That was it.
Ah, okay, the back comes off.
Wow.
That is a serious gasket there.
Wow, look at that.
(sighs)
Okay we got some screws, some capped on tape
that just came up.
Well, I'll pop those screws out.
No...
Is there a connector that I can pop off?
Oh, maybe,
Okay. So that board is out now.
Oh, it was stuck down with, like, tape.
So that's part of the issue.
This, is not sticky, or very sticky,
so possible it's for heat?
Yes.
That is probably a CPU,
and, uh, it's
a Ambarella, Ambarella.
I don't, I don't know that I got put...
Let's look it up.
AI vision processors.
So that thing probably gets hot.
I wonder if this little blue thing
is for transmitting heat
from there to this big metal block.
They have crammed a lot in here.
There's a lot on this board.
Alright, let's keep goin'.
Let's try, if I can get this front piece.
Alight get in there.
Let's try more heat.
I literally don't know what else to do.
It's getting warm. Let's try now.
Yup. Okay.
Okay.
Yes.
Yup, that's it.
That should pop out, yes.
Okay.
We finally have screws we can take out.
Alright.
That's good news!
Okay, I think these solder joints here go to a PCB
which holds this connector on.
The big enough pads it; it's possible they just
soldered that in there. It's so weird.
So non-standard.
I hope this gives you an appreciation for manufacturers
that are building consumer devices like this that are
so space-constrained.
This thing is very impressive.
I think I'm gonna have to de-solder this
because I don't know what else to do.
There's these two boards at right angles
and that connector isn't coming out.
Yeah, I'm melting the plastic.
Okay, I'm gonna get a solder iron.
That might be it for today.
I have to go drive and get the solder iron,
and I'm worried that I'm loosing my light, so,
I think I'm gonna stop here and I'll be back for you
in just a matter of seconds.
But for me, it will be tomorrow.
Alright, it's the next day.
I did go back and get my trusty HAKKO soldering iron.
(scraping noises)
Slightly cold, but.
Okay.
I'm gonna try this now.
(scrapping noises)
It's hard to see, but, back here there's another
one of those press-fit connectors.
Pop off.
Just a bunch of screws now.
Here, and here.
And this board lifts right out, okay.
So there's another board.
It's nice that all these screws are the same,
which is awesome.
There's one, and there's another one of those connectors
on here.
Wow, this is so many boards all packed into this tiny
little space.
There's that, then this pops off here.
It's
I just push, oh, there it is,
a screw buried way down in that hole.
Okay! There we go.
An empty shell.
So we have one board left on that,
which is this power connector.
It's not just adhesive, yes.
So let's see what we've got.
We got the main processor board.
We have the, this board here that's got
speaker, and then it's got a
USB
and
a bunch of connectors.
And then, uh,
this board here which has, uh, this looks like a,
a WiFi and Bluetooth module in the, the metal can here.
On that side, and then, uh, the two buttons:
the record and on/off button.
Uh, the battery connector there.
And then, the two connectors for the cameras.
The SD card slot.
And then, finally, the display, uh, which has,
uh, it's own flux PCB on the back here.
Let's look at the other camera.
Don't know how to get into this though.
But I think we've learned a lot about,
how the construction on these generally works.
Well, let's do the obvious...
and take out the screws on top, here and here.
I think this is a pry point.
To get this off, maybe,
let's see here.
It's less than I expected.
(gentle laughs)
The screws!
(laughs loudly)
That's quite simple.
I guess that's so you can replace that.
Or maybe, there's something else that goes on here.
Anyway,
that gives us access to some screws here.
That's convenient.
Sweet!
Okay.
That just is
a little spring
for this rotation mechanism.
Okay, I think it's the back here.
Let's use some hot air.
(whirring noises)
Let's try it again.
Getting some movement.
This sound... okay, yes. Man.
Lot's of glue on this.
There we go.
Alright, there we go.
Okay.
And, lift...
Okay.
This will lift out; so that's our camera module.
And, the connector, just, yeah, again, just a couple little
driver chips on this.
Nothing super fancy out here, and then
immediately into that, into that connector.
(soft laugh)
So the question remaining is: do I bust into the battery
or not?
Um, we can try?
I don't...
(loud giggles)
I'm a little nervous to go too town to hard on it.
I'm guessing that these are two parts here
just based on the colors.
And then it looks like this, here, is a part.
It looks like it's just gonna be a ton of glue.
If I use a lot of heat here... for obvious reasons...
I also don't want to use a ton of pressure for
obvious reasons.
(sighs)
Ah, this is really hard plastic.
Like an ABS, or ABS fibers in it maybe?
Or is it metal?
Oh, this part's metal!
Hm... no.
Just using lots of muscle on a lithium-ion battery
is always a good idea!
(sighs)
I hate it when I have bad ideas.
Yeah.
I think I'm playing against screws. I'm really not super
excited about hitting this with a heat gun.
How hot do you have to get a li-po before it gets unhappy?
Let's just work on a corner.
Alright, going with less is more right now.
Do you ever wonder that your life choices and how you
ended up in a particular situation...
How did I get so committed to,
(sighs)
do something that feels like a terrible idea?
Alright, got a crack opening here...
I don't wanna go in and then slice the li-po though.
(sighs)
I'll switch to plastic now.
I gotta...
Okay.
So, indeed, I was pulling screws out.
Let's pop those out, get the li-po in the bottom here,
and then a little connector board,
and a whole bunch of adhesive.
Looks like, oh, there was adhesive in the crack here,
I see.
And so it looks like there were most of these in here
but this is actually like an adhesive foam;
and I think this is just to position the battery but then
also give it room to expand. This is where
I need some good adhesive removing solvent
that they use on phones and things.
Really careful actually... I shouldn't even be using these
pokey tweezers. I'm gonna use the blunt nose just so I
don't puncture the battery.
And they've got some foam down here, just, they don't want
this rattling around.
So this is the battery management circuitry here that
maintains, you know, when, when should this thing charge?
When should this thing stop charging?
Usually there's a little circuit attached
right directly to the cell
that maintains voltage, does all the battery management
system stuff. If you saw the battery factory tour that I
did, um, it was the, the little bit where they were spot
welding on, quite near the end, uh, and that just
makes sure that the cell maintains all of the necessary
things. So it doesn't get over-charged,
it doesn't get under-charged, um, and it's, you know,
it's safety both for the health of the battery, but also
just safety for, like, fires and stuff.
Um, they call it the, the gas gauge... uh,
how charged is the battery? This board does all that.
Measures how much goes out, how much goes in.
How much current goes out, how much current goes in.
Voltages, and then you can figure out how much did the
battery charge.
And what the, what the, um, current health of the
battery is.
But it looks like this board is spot welded directly
onto the cell.
I don't know if I'll be able to get the cell out easily.
So you can see the little, two little silver tabs here are
then attached to that circuit board.
And this looks like it's a little thermocouple for doing
uh, immature measurement temperatures on things, so
the battery can actually tell if it's getting too hot.
That's cool.
I think there's probably foam on the bottom.
I just don't want to pry very hard for obvious reasons.
Semi-safely.
Oh and there's actually two thermocouples. Wow.
This is a quite cool device on the inside.
I really wanted to see how it all fit together.
It's got these, you know, it's got these interchangeable
um, camera connectors here, that, that, plug into these
sockets. But there's really not much going on on the
camera side. Um, which really means they've got sort of
this general purpose, you know, compute vision engine
going on over here. And, then they can plug
various camera front-ends into it.
And that would be kind of, you know, I- that's kind of
what I would imagine the architecture would be of
any camera. But it's so cool that it's modular because
it means that they can take new modules and as long as they
fit in to the right, you know, form factor,
they can, um, come out
with new, new cameras.
Taking this apart totally makes me wanna do a couple things.
One, it makes me want to make glasses that have
these cameras here, or like, maybe, like, on my forehead,
maybe like, maybe like, this. And uh, and then, like, it
could be, well it would be stereoscopic. You'd get a video
file out of each of these cameras, out of the box.
Right? That's what normally happens and then you stitch
them together in software, uh, but it'd be cool to have them
like, mounted here, and do, uh, 180 stereoscopic vision
that is like mounted to my head. Uh, and,
I'm really tempted to do that.
I wish this thing, like, voodoo-ed out on the work bench
right now. That would give me a lot of confidence.
Just charge, charge ahead down that road. Um, the fact
that it's not voodoo-ing out makes me reluctant.
(giggles)
But, I'm impressed now that I've seen the inside of this,
I am impressed with what they have built and how they
have built it, and this is clearly very high quality
engineering. And they very clearly, really know
what they're doing and have thought a lot about it.
Um, so, I am impressed at how much they have managed
to cram into a very very small space, um.
As I mentioned in the beginning, if you wanna see
this camera in action, I tried it out for a few days before
I took it apart and I made a review video.
You can click up here to watch that.
Uh, the short version is that I really liked it.
Uh, it's a little rough around the edges, but it's all
things that I think can be fixed in software.
Ah, I've been using, a, uh, Insta360 ONE X and I really
like the idea of shooting in 360 and then reframing in
post down to a standard 16 x 9 video format.
Ah, just, when I'm shooting in chaotic environments
it gives me a lot more options.
So, I was honestly really sad to take this apart.
Ah, I'd love to have one in my standard filming kit.
So I might have to go pick one up, or, see if I can
convince Insta360 to hook me up with another one that
I promise not to take apart this time.
Ah, let me know if you enjoyed this!
This is my first time doing a tear-down video.
I have a few other things to take apart, either that I
picked up at CES way back in January or that I've gotten
in the mail. And, um, so let me know if you'd like to
see more of this. I also have a few more electronics
projects in the works. I'm excited to be finally back
building things again. So, stay tuned for that.
I'm Scotty from Strange Parts.
If you haven't already, hit that subscribe button down
below, and I'll see you again soon.