"Reverse" Engineering a Camera

We were given an old, broken digital camera. So we disassembled the camera to see how it worked. We performed the disassembly just like Daddy would, if he were at work.

We started by carefully drawing out all the sides to the camera, listing all of the screws. (The reason for this to be able to put the camera back together again, although we were not going to do that.)



Next, we carefully start removing the screws, one by one. In this picture, Tekla is turning the screwdriver, while Jael is holding the point on the screw.



Luckily, the project worked very well with the personalities involved to become a group project.


Even Saoirse and Mordecai helped out with the work....Alright, I am not sure what Mordecai did, but Saoirse cleared the parts out of the way as soon as we took them off and tried to build something with them. Sometimes it was a sailboat, sometimes a doggy, and sometimes....well, I couldn't exactly understand what she was saying, but we were all very enthusiastic about it with her.




After we removed the majority of the screws, we still could not get it apart. Then we discovered that the plastic front was really just held on with glue. Once we peeled that off, we found all of the remaining screws underneith and had to make some more drawing.s



This is one of Jael's drawings of the camera. You can see the screws taped over the top of the screw in the drawing so we don't loose the location.



This is one of Tekla's drawings. The squiggly lines inside of the rectangle, on the right, are to indicate the writing on the label...the one that says make, model, s/n etc.



Final print layout, and placement of one of the last screws. The girls learned the difference between forceps and tweezers while working on this project.