 I have a new spider. Bear with me, there's a point to this. This is an atypus affinis purse web spider, also known as an atypical tarantula. She's about 25 millimeters long, jet black and lives underground. I found her the other day walking across the pavement outside my apartment, which is very much the wrong place for a burrowing spider so I took her home with me and put her in this enclosure. Now the reason why you can't see her is because she's underground. Her burrow is under here and you can see here the end of her trap which she uses to catch prey. This blob, by the way, is a spider turd. Now the problem is these purse web spiders, they live underground and they're only active during the night. So if I want to get video of her building her trap and various excavations over here, I will need a camera that works at night. That is why I'm making this video. So she has gone back to the study allowing me to bring out my second exhibit. This is a Fuji Finepix F5700 digital camera, as you can tell from the label. It is the camera I had before I had the camera before the one that I'm recording this video on. It's old, it's not particularly brilliant and honestly I thought this was broken until I turned it on before this video. Turns out that this camera is actually pretty good at picking up infrared. So if I can build myself an infrared lamp out of an LED ripped out of an old remote control, I'm sure I have one somewhere. And if I can remove the infrared filter from this camera, I should be able to rig up some kind of infrared filming system which will allow me to record what the spider does during the night. Now a little bit of background. The CCDs that these cameras operate on, which you cannot see through the lens there, are actually sensitive to infrared. But this causes the pictures to come out weird. So the camera manufacturer has put in an infrared filter in front of the sensor to block out the infrared light. And with this camera, it's allegedly pretty straightforward to open it up and remove this filter. Just thus allowing the camera to pick up infrared and there's all kinds of interesting visual effects you can do during the daytime. But what I'm interested in is doing nighttime recordings. This is a little bit risky in two ways. Firstly, digital cameras are pretty delicate. And there's a reason why I want to do this with this old camera because this is worth nothing. I actually thought it was broken until I tried it earlier. The second risky part is that the camera flash is driven off a pretty meaty capacitor. And it's important not to let the capacitor discharge through me because this can be potentially life-threatening. So I am going to have to be extremely careful and possibly make sure it's discharged using my patent discharge resistor, which is not patented. So the first thing I need to do is go and find a copy of the instructions because I am not doing this blind. Okay, well, I've got the instructions set up here and I've got my tool. So let's give this a go. The first thing it says to do is to undo these two screws here. I do also have a Canon 1000D. And now it wants these two. A Rebel XS in American. And that is also convertible. But the process looks incredibly fraught and I don't want to do it. That will produce much better results. It doesn't record video, but it is possible to budget using a PC so that you can get video out of it. There we go. All right. We're already on to step three, which is undoing more screws. This will record video, but it's only 640x480. So we'll see. It'll do for a first try. That's better. Okay, we do not undo these two, but we do undo these three. That's this one, which is a little bit fluffy. I think a battery has not had a good time there. Three. All right. Step four is this side. This is where the card lives. And you want to undo this screw. All right. Now it says gently lift up back cover. I think that's this. It does seem to be quite a lot of stuff coming with it. Oh, that's interesting. This is broken. I hope I just didn't break that. Just needed coaxing. The screen has not separated. I think the stress was supposed to have been left behind. What fastens this in glue? You can see in there the screen is still connected. There's a solid metal back. Right. It's glued. So gentle pressure and it's coming loose. There we go. Yeah, it's ancient adhesive. This thing is years and years old. Is there a manufacturer date? I don't see one. There we go. Right. Wow. That's disgustingly dirty. Okay. Disconnect the marked ribbon cables. This one is should be flipped up like so. And it just pops out. And the piece of tape needs coming off. Giving access to this connector. And that comes off. Yes. That probably wants to clean before I put it back in again. We need to remove the screws for the cage. Okay. So that exposes the PCB. Another warning about terminals up there. And instruction to flip this open. Now we're here. Just going to have a quick look at the PCB. Here are the buttons for the controls. Little cast and net things. The main chip is a Sanyo evincer. And some code numbers. Piece of transparent plastic there for some reason. This, the shape looks like a flash or a RAM chip. I suppose it could be either. This thing has a small amount of internal storage. Well it'll have internal flash for the program. But it's also got some internal flash for storing photos. Not very many. I think there's enough space for about four seconds of video. Okay. Gently unscrew this one. And disconnect that ribbon cable. Gently lift up the circuit board. This exposes. This is the monster flash capacitor. Which is definitely to be avoided. There's a sensor of some description here. It might be to detect whether the case is open. Apparently it does have something that does that. Thing is, can I get this folded out of the way? Because you need access to this little board inside. Are there any tight looking wires? I think all we need to do now, we need to take out four screws. This one. This one. This one. This one. Can I actually reach that? Yes. That screw has fallen into the case. Disturbingly close to the high voltage lines. Let's try and remove the rest of this. Question. Do I want to try and discharge that capacitor? It's my resistor. It's a one mega ohm resistor. Which provides enough resistance to avoid sparks. But it'll still discharge reasonably quickly. Let's get this one out and then see what's changed. All these little silver screws are the same, thankfully. Okay. So does this now allow us to lift this PCB up? Yes. Not very well. Yes. Let's discharge this. That should be all that's needed. Assuming it made contact, that is. But that should at least make it a little bit less fraught working on the thing. This board is tucked under this metal thing there. The instructions do not actually show that metal piece. So let's just pull that out. There we go. And this reveals here. This is the sensor and that shiny pink piece of glass. I don't know if it's showing up pink on camera. It says it's called the hot mirror. This is the filter. And it says it's not glued. So I should just be able to lift it off like that. Beautiful, clear piece of glass. That's going to get horribly dirty as soon as I put it down. Then we tuck this back in and it's time to reassemble. Before we do that, just remove that screw. All right. That's a different size to the others. So let's just deal with that now. So this goes there. Let me do up the other screws. There we go. This, I don't know what it is, but it pushes against that piece of plastic there, which is interesting. Anyway, this now folds down. That's ribbon cable out of the way. It should push into place. This I think goes over. No, this goes under like so. So screw here. This was the only one we took out from the PCB. Okay. So let's do this ribbon cable up. So the clamp folds up. The ribbon cable drops in and the clamp goes down. Very simple. I like these connectors. And now we simply go in reverse. We've done this bit. Now we want to put the cage back on, which goes here. This is the most dubious screw hole because it's got this ground thing there. So let's actually start with something easier. Let's do this one. Now look at the state of the viewfinder. I took this to a lot of places. I took some quite nice pictures with it. As a starter camera, it worked quite well, but the sensor left a lot to be desired. Well, not so much the sensor, the lens. It suffered badly from chromatic aberration in bright environments. So trying to take pictures of trees against the white overcast sky. There'd be rainbow banding all over them. Okay. Now we want the... Let's actually take a moment to clean this. Yeah, I don't think that did anything. Okay, so the screen sits on like this. So make sure the flap is up. Push the Mylar connector into place. Push the flap down. Come on. No, that's not working. I think the cable wasn't in right. That's better. Okay, and then there's this ribbon cable. This is the one that operates, that is used to get access to these buttons and the wheel. In fact, not the front panel buttons. The front panel buttons, of course, push these castanets switches through the cage. So this is another of these. This one's probably trickier. Mylar goes in like that. Push down. Come on. There you go. That's in squint. Let's do that one again. The folds in the Mylar are all permanent. So in fact, it's very springy and doesn't want to go into the right place. Come on. There we go. Like so. Good. And now this should just push down into place. Except we need to put these back on. That goes on there. And this goes in here like so. So push the back on. Good. That has actually gone into place reasonably well. Now it's this screw. All right. So with luck, we should now have an infrared capable camera. So I'm just going to have to hook it up. What's my PA on that? So we're just going to, I'm going to have to now hook it up and see what comes out. And more importantly, see if it still works. Better. Still not brilliant. All right. I will be right back. All right. I have the camera all hooked up and ready to go. I have the AV output from the camera fed into a video capture thing, which is why you're seeing this box up here, which contains what I will be seeing on the screen. Sadly, the AV output resolution is dreadful, which is why everything is so fuzzy. I don't think it's 64480. I think it's more like 320 by 240. It's really bad. But it does at least show how the thing works. So the first thing I will do is get out this remote control and demonstrate that it is showing up. It gets on camera UV. And yes, most cameras will do this, but if I hold the filter glass in front, come on, you can see that it is blocking out nearly all the light. So you can just see a bit flicker with the filter, but without it's good and bright. And in fact, you can use it as a infrared flashlight, which is nice. And of course, my real camera is showing nothing at all because it does have an infrared filter. Okay. Now, the bad news is that the autofocus on the camera doesn't seem to be working properly anymore. It works all right at close range. So I have it pointed at this screwdriver so that I can focus on that. And it is succeeding. The picture on the screen looks all fuzzy, but if I take a picture, I can then use video editing to slap that picture I took up and you see it is actually mostly in focus. However, if I pull it back and pan up to this focus target I set up and try and focus, you see that it is complaining that autofocus has failed. And I'm not sure why it's doing that. Now, I forgot to actually test this before I did anything, so it may be that it was in fact broken before then. However, I can switch to manual focus, which is kind of terrible on this thing. To do manual focus, I have to hold down the button here and then use this rocker switch to adjust the focus. And it does it really slowly. So that is the wrong direction. And that is as far as it will focus. So I am not really sure what's going on. This is a flat piece of glass. It shouldn't be affecting the focus properties of the camera at all. So that's interesting. I wonder if the focal plane of the sensor has moved somehow. Maybe this thing is supposed to act as a spacer. But I wouldn't have thought it was be that loose. It certainly wasn't when I undid it. However, you can work around it by using the zoom. That thinks it's focused, but it hasn't. So let's just manually adjust. Come on. Oh, yeah, it won't go in that direction. There we go. And you can see from the yellow circle in the middle of the viewfinder that it thinks it's in focus. So I will take a picture there. It thinks the camera is shaking probably because my hands on it. Let's just use the timer like so. So you can see that this photo and the other one has actually worked reasonably well. I mean, it's not a brilliant camera. It's years old and wasn't particularly expensive, even when new. But I think this will do fine. What I'm going to do is not try to use the camera's own controls to actually film the spider. I'm going to try and drive it from a PC using the USB connection, which is a non-standard thing that the AV is coming out of. It can either be analog, composite video, or USB. At least so I hope. Anyway, I believe that I now have a working infrared camera, which is nice. The next step is to light the spider's enclosures somehow, and for that I will need an infrared floodlight. So I am going to tackle that one next time. I hope you enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments.