Pill camera teardown

Investigation of pill camera used for capsule endoscopy.
Here's a teardown of a different type of pill-cam :www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH6i3bfie_E

• Category

  Science & Technology

[lastchancename]

Great breakdown.

I'd love to have seen the output deciphered... As you say, it looked like raw line/pixel data and may have been interesting for other uses.

And yes- assuming patients don't keep them as souvenirs (!) there must be tens of thousands of these floating around out there in medical waste incinerators - adding lithium and silver oxide to the environment.

Cheers

[mikeselectricstuff]

Not waste incinerators - sewage works.

[adshea507]

I think the 6-pin chip might be a small MCU rather than a voltage regulator. Given that most medical stuff is low-volume it would make more sense for them to use a standard CMOS camera sensor with an MCU that drives the LEDs and sends Preambles and does manchester encoding. The Coms only needs one pin, the LEDs need one pin, and an I2C camera would take 2 pins. That way they can make plenty of profit even with the huge medical certification overhead.

[mikeselectricstuff]

The I2C interface on chip cameras is for setup only - you can't get video data on any that I've seen.

It's possible it's a custom chip or MCU, but if so I'd expect it to only be doing power management, in particular the on/off control - it's hard to get at 3 of the pins but one of the accessible pins has the LED pulse on it. I'll attempt to probe the others at some point.

Modifying an existing CMOS camera to add a manchester encoder and a frame count wouldn't be a huge expense.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Another thought - 320x320 isn't a standard resolution, so that alone would suggest a custom camera chip. this application is unusual in that there is no natural orientation.

If you look at sample mirocam footage on youtube, they clip to an octagonal window, presumably due to lens distortion at the corners.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I managed to scope the other hard-to-get-at pins - it only has LED waveforms on it, so probably a constant-current regulator/switch.

[HansTheAtheist]

Looking at the insides of something designed to look at your insides... I call that revenge!

[mikeselectricstuff]

Stay tuned - it may well happen!

[GTXAbunada]

EPIC Intro.

[Tom Hoehler]

Please clean it first! LOL!  That would be a given! Great vid Mike. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for posting.

[Þórarinn Bjartur Breiðfjörð Gunnarsson]

I also am currious about Q1

[Þórarinn Bjartur Breiðfjörð Gunnarsson]

I am curious why blur the info on the receiver?

Thx for a very interesing video lot of things i learn

[TheSnake1588]

Question #1: Why did you censer out the label on the receiver.

Question #2: I really want you to take apart a CT scan machine.

[Jeroenz0r]

Hmm uTube486 asked the same thing 7 months ago; why did you block out the sticker?

[marcan42]

The encoding looks like Differential Manchester / BMC (since it seems polarity doesn't matter, only transitions, and depending on the header frame count value the rest of the header can be inverted).

[moinky2k]

The white wire may be some sort of antenna which picks up the surrounding EM noise in order to substract it from the electrode signal to get a better SNR. Seen this technique on a ECG.

[MarlosZappa]

OMG IT'S USED EWWWW

[o0Tao0o]

I would have worn gloves while handling that. ;)