Halo cloud video de-meh-lition
10As promised, here's a teardown of the Halo2cloudvideo.com device.
Here's the front of the device.
The back of the device.
Those two holes have the only visible screws here. We're going to need a tiny jeweler's Phillips head screwdriver here.
Let's try to open the case now- looks like the bottom half is still secured somewhere.
Time to check the back- open the battery cover, and remove the batteries.
We're in luck- there's two screws here we can remove.
Now let's try opening the case- no more screws this time, and just open slowly and be mindful of the wires from the battery terminal.
Here's the insides:
The blob on the left glued down is likely the magnet.
Depending on the difficulty and the interest of people, I might make an annotated version of this with the chips highlighted, and what they do.
You may notice there's two screws on this board, so let's remove them and see what's underneath.
We can see the display screen, the microphone, and the physical buttons on the board.
&
The buttons from the front are here, along with the speaker.
For those handy with soldering irons & have access to a hardware programmer, I have some thoughts on how to recover the videos.
Hope you enjoyed this (I did)!
If not, I blame @carl669 for your lack of curiosity.
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i enjoyed the teardown. now, if i'd only gotten a fuko so i could participate. damn you me!!
@carl669 I didn't get one either
I blame @carl669
What kind of memory does it use for the videos? I did a simple test by recording a video, took one of the batteries out for about a second and put it back in. The video was gone.
If you can recover the videos, that would suggest the memory is non-volatile and all my experiments on the produce shows it is very volatile.
@cengland0 I'm going to guess you're probably right: here's the main RAM chip-a Toshiba TC59SM716FT. I haven't tried to recover the videos- I had thought there might be some non-volatile storage on a chip, in which case recovery might be possible.
@dashcloud According to the datasheet the max standby current at 3.3 Volts is 1.00E-3 Amp. That is only 1mA so I wonder why my fresh batteries lasted less than a week.
Turn on the unit now and it displays a message a about the battery being low and it turns off. The message is hard to read because it displays it so quickly.
I wonder if that LCD could be repurposed as a nifty little display for a Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects?
@ruouttaurmind I'm going to guess you probably could, but it'll involve a little reverse engineering to figure out the pins, unless you get lucky and find a datasheet or blog detailing the particular model at hand.
@ruouttaurmind That is a common question, it's not worth the time. You can get a small LCD for the Raspi for fairly cheap, even ones with touch input. https://www.adafruit.com/products/2298 Same for the Arduino.
@The_Baron @ruouttaurmind You'd probably be better off spending ~$10 more and getting this one instead: https://www.adafruit.com/products/1983 (capacitive touch screen instead of resistive)
OK, I will ask.... thoughts on video recovery? If it is not way over my head I would experiment with mine.
I had the same results with an experimental recording and battery removal as @carl669
@speediedelivery is this some passive aggressive way of blaming me? because truth be told, i'm not getting it.
@speediedelivery Just a couple messages above, @carl669 said he was unable to get a Fuko. Perhaps you meant me because I performed that experiment and posted my results. But you can blame @carl669 anyway since he's deserving of all blame this month.
@cengland0 @carl669 is caused me to type the wrong name. This month has really had a lot of issues and it is only the 11th. I meant to remind @carl669 that he erased the recordings. Perhaps I should record a personal message and forward the Halo to him?
From the title of your post I expected to enjoy a video of you beating the crap out of it with a hammer...maybe running over it....meh.