Disposable Digital Video Camera

[sasteam 0]

Slightly interesting...

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8710267&src=rss/technologyNews

Crazy Ivan and the Crew (2005-2006)
Team Insane (2004-2005)
Insane in the Airplane (2003-2004)

[EricTheRed 0]

It would be worth $30 just to tear one apart IMO.

illegible usually

[Praetorian 1]

30 min onbord memory ... I wonder if its an SD card. would be worth 30 bucks to tear it appart if you could got a useable 512mb or 1gig SD card out of it

Good Judgment comes from experience...a lot of experience comes from bad
judgment.

[EricTheRed 0]

Are you reading my mind?

illegible usually

[sasteam 0]

From http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/12/pinouts_for_cvss_dis.html:

Pinouts for CVS's disposable camcorder

CVS Pharmacies sell a one-time-use camcorder that you have to bring to their shop once you're ready to get your videos, which are delivered on DVD. Enterprising hackers are racing to reverse-engineer the camcorder so that they can extract their own video and make multiple uses of the camera without paying repeatedly. A hacker has posted the pinouts for the camera on a Linux site, so victory is surely in hand:

Here is the pinout for the CVS one time use camcorder. Pin 1 starts at the end where J5 is printed on the PCB.

1 no connection
2 ground
3 no connection
4 Battery + (probably used to verify the battery level when recycling)
5 no connection
6 USB +5V
7 ground
8 USB Data +
9 USB Data -
10 ground

Pins 6 - 9 is the only pins needed to connect to a USB port.

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Crazy Ivan and the Crew (2005-2006)
Team Insane (2004-2005)
Insane in the Airplane (2003-2004)

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

30 min onbord memory ... I wonder if its an SD card. would be worth 30 bucks to tear it appart if you could got a useable 512mb or 1gig SD card out of it

The review I saw in the SF Chronicle (sfgate.com) indicated it has a 128m card. Listed video quality as fair, not going to replace a nice miniDV, but has a place, just as I might sometimes bring a disposable camera instead of my digital.

Interesting to read they're already finding ways to dump the data directly. Then it just becomes a matter of battery life.

[sasteam 0]

Update from Slashdot: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/25/1758235&tid=222&tid=137

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 25, @03:02PM
from the dept.
ptorrone writes "We've been watching this on MAKE closely- and the king of the one-time digital camera hacks/analysis finally got his hands on a CVS Camcorder on Friday, the 24th via someone shipping him one FedEx. Within 18 hours, he had slurped the flash memory and has the unencrypted, XVID codec, 320x240, 30fps movies stored in the camera on his computer."

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Crazy Ivan and the Crew (2005-2006)
Team Insane (2004-2005)
Insane in the Airplane (2003-2004)

[JuxtaCadet 0]

Yeah, but the catch to that is he had to rip out the flash from the camera and read in the raw data through a custom built flash-reader. A software hack so users can download through the cam's port will take a lot longer, but will be cool when it gets done.

http://www.maushammer.com/systems/index.html

[mr2mk1g 10]

I figure one of these is going to survive a terminal impact well enough for you to get the data off it. Who cares what happens to it after that. Ought to make for some interesting footage.