Canon PowerShot A560 Teardown and Salvage

I recently got my hands on a broken Canon PowerShot A560. It's not a very good camera. It's not a very special camera. It's capable of VGA video at 30fps and 7.1MP pictures. I'm not 100% what's wrong with it (other than a broken battery door), but it won't take full resolution pictures. Videos work just fine, but they're not worth fixing the battery door for. So we're going to take it apart the camera and see what we can salvage from it!

This is the camera. It looks like a camera. Okay, let's take it apart. First, we have several screws around the camera. Removing all of these in typical salvage. Plastic be gone!

Once the plastic was gone, the next logical thing to get was the screen. One ribbon connection and two soldered power cables and it comes off. We'll look at the parts in more detail later.

This revealed the main circuit board. The one with the buttons and the SD card reader comes off next.

Next I removed the piece of metal that was acting as the ground plane for a bunch of parts and moved to the front of the camera. The first thing to come off there is the flash. It would have been the lense barrel if I didn't strip the screw.

Okay so long story short I had to disassemble the entire camera to get at the rest of the parts. It all was intertwined and tangled together. It's amazing how these cameras pack so much in such a small package. And this isn't even a good camera or a small camera. So here is all of the camera all apart together.

And all of the parts we care about:

Let's look at these parts in closer detail.

This button/sd card PCB and flexible PCB with a few buttons are of little interest. There may be a RGB LED on the flexible PCB, but I haven't tested it yet.

This is the lens and photocell assembly. I may take this apart later, but for now I'd like to keep this intact.

This is the flash mechanism and the viewfinder. The viewfinder is pretty cool, and that capacitor is charged. I know because if you touch the board in the right place, you'll feel it. It doesn't shock you, it's just very obvious that something is hot on that board.

Next, we have the screen. It is a Casio screen of some kind. Hopefully a chip on the board will lend me a hint as to how this screen works. So lets move on to the board.

Let's look at the main chips on the board. First, we start with the main image processor. It is the Digic III (CK4-1127). This is a DSP, the CPU, and also has some RAM on it according to the very little info I could find on it. This is responsible for most of the camera's functionality. Next to it is the onboard RAM chip. There is also some flash memory. On the other side, there is an Analog Devices AD9923A which is described as a complete front end solution for digital still cameras. This could be the bit that's broken, as it contains the ADCs and high precision timers that are required for high resolution images. Also on this side of the board is a MB39C302A which also does not have a lot of documentation. All I could find is that it has something to do with PWM and power management.

Nothing came up that resembled a screen controller, and nothing came up with the LCD screen model number. So I'll just have to play around with it for a bit and see what I can find. Other than that, I'll just have to play around with these parts a bit. Cameras are always neat, and just like printers they are full of interesting things. Hopefully this will not be the only camera I tear down.