I've stumbled into ownership of a bunch of consumer grade wireless surveillance cameras. Xanboo cameras, to be exact. I don't need surveillance at the house, so I figured I'd pop one of these babies open and see what parts I can harvest.
Low and behold, there's a couple flashable PIC microprocessors in there (PIC16F874 & PIC16F628). There's one that looks like the main mcu and the other one looks to be handling the wireless part. Wires from the main board, up through the neck where the PIR, Mic, and CCD sensors reside. The sensors are mounted on a circuit board with a bunch of SMD resistors, caps, a crystal, and a couple dual opamps. There are 6 wires connecting the sensors, down through the neck of the camera to the main MCU. They've nicely silk screened the labels for the wires, and they are: +5v, GND, Audio, Video, +5v, PIR.
I'm seeing something that has me completely confounded. Namely:
How can they be passing video from the CCD to the base across a single wire? I guess it must be digitally encoded, but doesn't that require a clock reference or something (i.e. second wire)? There's no MCU on the sensor circuit board. I'm trying to trace out the leads off the CCD, but that's a chore that'll take a few days/weeks.
Why do I care? Well, I thought that rather than harvesting all the parts, this unit might be a suitable PIC based camera platform that I could experiment with (heck, I could snip off the camera/sensors and just use the PIC). I'm not even really interested in the wireless part, since I know that its a non-standard wireless solution.
Heck, if anyone thinks they can figure this out, I'll mail ya one of them.
If all else fails, I guess I can desolder the PIR, mic, and the PIC and then build my own PIC board. Seems a shame, though.
