Inside stuff - Tenvis IPROBOT3 - WiFi IP camera

I got one of these units at a "gadget exchange meeting". The kind where both parties have mostly useless gadgets and they exchange them. Oh, the camera kept resetting as well.

Time to void some warranties.

There's a screw hidden beneath the lens cover:

The connectors, for reference:

The lens assembly just unscrews. The ring of LEDs has a green status LED (left), a motion sensor (right) and a light sensor (bottom) while the rest of them are IR LEDs.

There's a decently-sized sensor and in this shot you can also see the "IR Cut filter".

Off:

And on:

Here's me torturing the physical filter with a cue tip:

The filter is driven by a small solenoid. I've made a couple of slow-motion videos with it but they did not turn out so great.

Finally, the lens assembly:

It has a focus stopper ring, so that you can screw the lens in all the way and it would always stay at the preset distance/focus length.

Looking at the main board, from top-left side: power plug, microSD slot, reset button, Ethernet port.

The GM8125 ARM9-based Soc:
http://www.grain-media.com/html/documentation/GM8125-8126-8128_2011-09.pdf
http://www.openipcam.com/files/ARM9/GM8126/GM8126%20v1.1/Docs/Datasheet/GM812X_Data_Sheet_V0.4.pdf

The pan/tilt assembly is quite impressively done and they've also used a steel bearing 6903Z.

 The Z suffix means it was not the cheapest one, as you can see by the shield.

The high reduction motor is quite noiseless as well. Would love to get it out for playing, but the unit is still functional. Oh well...

Finally, we get to the problem: the reset button becomes stuck in the housing, because of the crooked soldering angle.

After a quick reflow with the soldering iron....

...it now sits concentric with the housing hole:

I've played a bit with the unit and was pretty satisfied with the performance and image quality. However, I'm slightly worried about using this as-is since it has some P2P services which allow control from anywhere, through firewalls. Paired with a beefy processor, Linux 2.6.something and no full sources it is a recipe for security disaster.