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yes finally! ive got my hands on an internal laptop wecam board. Ive always wanted to see what they put in these things cause laptop webcams have evolved very well. This is probably one of smallest image sensors till date, the lense is approximately 2mm in dia. This one happens to be from a sony FZ series laptop, bought from ebay for £14. |
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Pinouts: The information i got from the internet does state that internal webcams are USB. the pinouts i got from the web did not match with this sony board. the method i used to locate the pinouts is as follows: step one: locate the ground pin using the 24c16 eeprom, pin 4 is ground, also the golden path holes are ground. step two: locate the v+ using the decoupling smd capacitor right next to the grount pad. this can be double checked with the 0 ohm resistor on the board marked 000. step three: location the usb data pins is by trial and error, it is logical that in this case they may lie between the supply lines. this can be double confirmed with the pullup resistors usually on the usb. in most cases usb data pins are pulled high by in this case the multimeter shows identical resistance between data and v+ nearly 11K each. I am not too sure of the NC pin yet, first i thought this will be an enable input. but the camera worked without it. |
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Soldering the board: Soldering the board did not look difficult because there are test points under the board. the connecting cable is also available on ebay and is a better option. it sells for £9.99. I mounted the board on a vero board because it looks prety thin and delicate. the two mounting holes makes it easier. |
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you might think its all done but this was the most difficult part : installing the driver. It is a sony web cam and belongs to the FZ series, first i downloaded the FZ1 drivers and installed the camera driver, it installed okay. It activated the camera and i could see the led going on, but there was no picture! Then i realized i had a similar problem when trying to use the PS2 Eye toy as a webcam. I remembered that i had used USB Snoopy Pro to correct the driver. first i looked at the driver for FZ1 which had the following details in R5U870FL.inf : VID = 05ca and PID_1837 this is what Snoopy pro showed:
I tried to change the PID in the inf file but it did not work, showed an error. on searching for the VID and the PID i found that this webcam belongs to sony FZ250AN, later i found the FZ3 driver from ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/VAIO/ORIGINAL/ and it works perfectly. here is a screen shot :
there it sits on my laptop:
Additional links and credits : http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4268327 http://www.delock.de/produkte/gruppen/industriemodule/USB20_CMOS_Kameramodul_13_95810.html?action=showfaq& uploaded 04/01/09 23:15 peace |
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